Was this the right thing to do?
I basically don't read reviews (especially not by "professional critics") because I've learned that I tend not to agree with the majority a lot of the time in life in general, and I don't really care what other people think, I'm going to like what I'm going to like and it doesn't matter if you like it or not. My own tastes and preferences will determine what I do with my money, thank you. :)
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I normally don't read critics and I had already preordered! I was just watching stuff on it before I actually downloaded and played. Thought it was just a very unprofessional review D: I agree with you 100% though!
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I tend not to look at critics! Just base it off of reading steam reviews I suppose! Not as much now though
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Reviews should be detailed, rounded and cover all the important parts.
Regarding performance, they should reflect on why (if) the performance is bad (or good) and try to provide an objective explanation. If it's a general error then criticism may be warranted. It depends on the situation I guess - but generally games shouldn't crash just because a player did something slightly unexpected, so I could understand why that'd be weird.
Either way, the review should also cover gameplay, story, graphics, video etc. all the other parts that make up the whole. Any review that only mentions performance and then stops cannot be taken seriously in my eyes. Unless the game is utterly unplayable, I suppose, but at least that should be explained then.
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Yeah I watch this guy on youtube called ACG and he does great reviews that are very indepth. We tend to have similar thoughts so hes perfect to watch! When I look at reviews I always gravitate to the more in depth discussions on the overall game and not just one aspect!
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I have found a steam review that is purely youtube spam channel and the guy is even complaining other people already making live videos of the game. He deleted every comment critisizing this shit, called a friend (or an alt account), wrote that the review was very positive and helpful and move on.
Review world is turning into cancer. Fast.
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I recommend you watch ACG he is one of the few keeping the review world alive I think! :D
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I wouldn't hold a single person severely overreacting against a game, no.
It's not like this sort of thing with game-breaking bugs hasn't happened before, and basically flipping out and lashing out in spite because this is the first time you run into something like this yourself is not how a professional reviewer should behave.
Anyway, Jim did update and redo his review with apology, for his initial knee-jerk reaction, so there's that. Short version: Game still loses points over game-breaking bug, but it doesn't completely tank the review anymore.
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Yeah I just was taken a back a little from such a well known name. I respect the man for owning up and redoing it.
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I think the 1/10 is perfectly fine since as you said it was a rare case other review scores will even it out. If the game has a game breaking glitch it's great that it's being reflected in at least one review in my opinion since that shouldn't be a part of the experience in a "perfect" game.
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I just find it weird with the 1... Since he said it was a fantastic game. 1 just seemed really silly for something he could have reported as a bug!
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a game breaking bug where the game auto saved before he realised he didn't pick up a key object for a puzzle. It was user error
Nope, that is a pretty obvious baseline game design error that should have been found in any half-decent test phase. If someone still uses one save file on a game (even though consoles don't have this technical limitation for a decade now), then any kind of situation where the player can soft-lock themselves, especially near the start, is a clear sign of a rushed game or trying to save money on the beta testing phase.
Whether it deserves a 10% rating or not because of that is a different matter.
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Oh it definitely wasn't a rushed game. I've been keeping up with the development. I think sometimes things just slip through the cracks. Its fine though, he has redone the review and owned up saying he was in the wrong
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Yeah I definitely understand that its a massive bug, but I believe it would have been better to delay the review and notify the dev team of the game breaking bug.
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A reviewer can give whatever score he wants since reviews are personal opinions on a specific content.
However, a good critic will try to be the most objective possible, understanding his biases and preferences. In this case, Jim was totally unfair and had an emotional response that was totally uncalled for. Very unprofessional, in my opinion.
Edit: This doesn't excuse the glaring design mistake. A single save game with a fail state and no way to continue?
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Yeah the bug is really bad but its just really unprofessional of Jim. I expected better of him. Delaying the review would have been the best point of action and to notify the team of the bug since its an easy fix
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I wouldn't even call it a bug since it is working as intended... it's a major design slipup from the developers that is hard to justify. But It is not the first time something like this happens.
In the end, Jim just had a Temper Tantrum (digital homicide pun intended) that he himself acknowledges :)
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i do a lot of reviews and if i hit a bug i'll put it in there. with reviews being subject, whatever the reviewer puts in is fair since its how they feel. its up to the reader if they feel it applies to them. i feel the best reviews just explain the game and make the opinion a very minor thing to sum it up at the end.
i hate joke reviews more than anything because i feel its not a "real" review and when i say "joke" i mean, positive "10/10 would delete again" ones. "did not work" tells more about the game than joke review.
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I think a lot of the time with people who have issues, they can post it in the discussion boards. Plenty of games have had some bugs in them that I've played but I've never down voted it because of that. For example, Batman Telltale had a black screen and simply deleting a file fixed it then later it was patched then the team was told about it. Its just silly really because good games get bashed for little bugs (well this case it was a big bug)
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depends on the bug and i always look into them to see how common it is and post fixes in my reviews if there is one. a score is meaningless without the text explaining why it got said score.
look at the one aliens game that was broken on day one (when you pay the most). yes, they may fix it but its allways after a sale so any review bashing it is well deserved and should stay there even after the fix. i have had this happen to many times and this is why i never preorder unless the bonuses are really nice because pc devs feel they can push out a broken game to meet deadlines and just patch it later.
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Having downvoted a game just yesterday because I had to completely restart due to a gamebreaking bug, I can understand the reasoning. Having to replay the start for no reason at all again while you just played it due to sloppy development is the opposite of fun.
Considering Steam only has up or down though, I don't have to deal with the whole scoring thing.
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Yeah I totally understand your frustration, I feel its best to write a full review though because something may be later patched which in turn means your review is false
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Anything that negatively affects the experience of the game is a valid reason to give a bad review, IMHO. Bugs, crashes, poor design, bad dialogue, etc - any of those (and a dozen more) can easily ruin what would otherwise be a good game.
Jim mentioned a game breaking bug where the game auto saved before he realised he didn't pick up a key object for a puzzle. It was user error but he gave it a 1/10.
Like talgaby said, that's plain poor design and testing, and should reflect in the review, as it directly affects the game experience. A game-breaking bug is just that - a game-breaking bug. Should it affect the score so much? Hmm, maybe not (my opinion), but a review is just that - one person's opinion. I tend to get several before buying a game, though, and never rely on one person's opinion of a game before buying.
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Oh I definitely agree with that, I've played a lot of games where crashes, poor design etc have ruined a good game with great potential. However, when reviewing things I feel like the good and bad should be laid out and the overall score shouldn't be based on one aspect such as performance.
For example, Telltale Batman got panned on release for black screens. So now it has been patched, so many reviews are false as they literally state "refund it doesn't work." Which is ashame because it is a pretty decent adaptation of the comics.
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Anything that negatively affects the experience of the game is a valid reason to give a bad review, IMHO. Bugs, crashes, poor design, bad dialogue, etc - any of those (and a dozen more) can easily ruin what would otherwise be a good game.
+1
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Yeah he is totally allowed to voice his own opinion. "Free speech" as Americans say. However, he did do a video stating he was wrong so take your comment with a pinch of salt ;)
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Jim mentioned a game breaking bug where the game auto saved before he realised he didn't pick up a key object for a puzzle. It was user error but he gave it a 1/10. It was a rare case and I really doubt a lot of people will have thought that way when testing the game. Did the game deserve this review? Do any games deserve reviews like this to the extreme?
Personally I'm sick of all that auto-save trend where the user doesn't get to save whenever they want. If on top of that the game auto-saves at inappropriate moments, screwing the player in the process, a bad review as a result is fair game in my book. If the devs don't want them, all they have to do is provide a normal save system, instead of trying to be smart (and failing at it)...
Anyhow as stlpaul said, in the end everyone's got their own taste, so the content of the reviews is more interesting than the final rating itself IMO. I've sometimes found a product attractive thanks to the arguments developed in negative reviews, or on the contrary found a product was really not for me thanks to the arguments developed in positive reviews.
Generally, I actually focus a lot more on the bad reviews so as to have a good idea of all the bad things that can be said about the product, and see if that still suits me. Good reviews aren't that interesting, you'll already find all the positive elements in the product presentation and in the negative/mixed reviews if they are detailed enough.
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Agree. Negative reviews are helpful. I appreciate reading them. Generally a theme emerges as to what specifically some players don't like, and I can translate that to my preferences.
So if someone is complaining about not running 60FPS at 1080p at max graphics I can pretty much ignore that because I'm never going to try that. If someone says the game is too easy I usually ignore that because I'm generally a more casual player.
But if I'm reading lots of reviews in adventure games about "non-intuitive puzzles" and "pixel hunts" - I know those are just frustrating and try to avoid. If negative reviews of strategy games talk alot about "too much micromanagement, esp. in late game" I know that's something to pay attention to.
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Oh I definitely agree with you. I think that autosaving should be a toggle on/off in the settings. However, I do like autosaves since manually saving tends to fuck me over especially when I stupidly don't save in a while.
I do the same, I always look at the negative reviews. Its just annoying having to sift through the ones that just literally say "1/10 it crashes"
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Well, if there are so many reviews complaining about crashes that they get annoying, you know you can expect crashy-crashy if you buy, so that's still a good info to have ;)
I think the general problem is more that we have no reliable technology yet to aggregate all reviews, so 100 times the same review is indeed a pain to read, even if that repetition is itself a worthy piece of information. Natural Language Processing is getting better and better, so maybe automated review-summarizing bots will come sooner than we think.
About autosave, yeah the optimal system IMO is a combination of auto and manual save (with a decent if not unlimited number of slots). Which old games seemed to have a lot more often than modern ones.
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I actually focus a lot more on the bad reviews so as to have a good idea of all the bad things
Same :) If some amount of people complains about the game being difficult, then I'd better avoid it. And vice versa, if they complain about it being too easy, I know I'm likely going to enjoy it :D
I kind of agree with you about the auto-save "trend" as well, by the way :)
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Nah it shouldn't be like that in the first place, however I believe that most if not all games will have bugs on release because people are only human and some bugs can slip through the cracks. I just didn't think the game deserved 1/10 because of one aspect and just abandoning the fact he said the game was great up to where he played. I also think a game should be fully reviewed after playing the full game
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I am playing through Magicka DLC (The Stars are left) and I would give it a negative review because I have gone through it over 5 times now and have got game breaking glitches each time, making it impossible to finish. I wouldn;t recommend it at all for this very reason.
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I don't give much value to number reviews, I think the written review is much more important than just good or bad.
And performance is definitely a valid critique of a game, it can ruin your experince playing. But in that particular case it seems stupid to reduce something to a 1/10 because of one bug imo.
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I don't pay much attention to review scores, I just read what's being praised/complained about and try to judge for myself if it'll affect me (not just for games, had several cases where negatives for the reviewer were actually exactly what I was looking for/enjoyed).
About game breaking bugs/glitches dampening the experience - I found one in a small indie game a while ago, posted it in the Steam forums, the developer fixed it in my file and promised a general fix in the next update, but before he put that up it happened again to me. So he fixed it again, mentioning I was the first/only person this ever happened to XD It was a superobvious thing though (transforming a thing while on a portal tile also transformed the tile and thus removed the portal - and in the final level you're actually under lots of pressure and can't pay much attention to which tile you're on). Anyways, I actually gave the game a positive review - without discovering the bug and having those nice interactions with the dev, I probably wouldn't have reviewed it at all. I definitely don't think I would've gone negative if I'd just found the glitch and stopped playing without asking for help.
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I think it is welcome on steam.
Very few people are fair and trustworthy critics, let alone on Steam, but the vast array of reviews from gameplay, to graphics and stability on various specs from low to high end, seem to be, for me at least, more reassuring when it comes to buying the product, then whatever the fuck Jim "reviews"
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Never check rating, rating system should not even be used as people like different things, pricing might affects the score with some, reviewers use different scales while weighting the game etc, other might give a good game 7 while some other hits it with a 10.
I'll usually check video reviews, if the game is one that I might like. Many times what reviewers think is bad in the game is something I don't mind or care at all.
Game breaking bug would be pretty high on my list to not to buy a product, at least until it's fixed.
Oh and Jim's review: Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
EDIT: And people, stop pre-ordering games.
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He stated that it was a bit of a rage case and he said while he could wait until AFTER they fixed the game he even said it himself. "I rate the game I have now, not the game it will be."
While scoring it a 1/10 for rage is NOT a good thing scoring it a 1/10 due to a bunch of game breaking glitches is in my eyes completely justifiable since why would you pay money for a game that is broken? I don't mind reviews on games based on performance since if I see someone bashing a game for not working properly because they have a particular set up I want to know what kind of set up they have since if I have that same set up I don't want to deal with trying to fix the game and risk spending 2 hours in troubleshooting a game and can no longer refund a game I can't play.
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CTDs and bug-ridden game should be trashed. If they can't properly make games, they deserve it.
But I agree performance issues shouldn't determine the outcome alone. I put emphasis on it personally, though.
But how to play if it crashes right and left?
Maybe I would ignore it if it crashes once every ten hours for example, but one crash every hour would drive me nut and I'd rather not play that kind of game.
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Like many others, I don't really pay attention to game reviews. I take them for what they are - opinions.
That said, a single bug/issue shouldn't lower a game's rating that drastically in my opinion, but it should definitelly be mentioned in the review. It's a bug after all, so it shouldn't happen.
I didn't watch the whole video yet by the way, but I have to agree with Jim about the "release it now, fix it later" attitude that is so popular these days :/
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