VGCulture - Jumping the gun in game reviews

Source: Youtube Channel machinima

Dragon's Dogma released today and reviews of it were already up prior to its release.  Back a while ago, the game industry and its community fear for the ravenous players who want the attention from others to say their piece on a game.  The problem with a lot of reviews by players (even now) is that a lot of them has very little to do with the actual game and is usually based off of first-impressions, biased outlooks on a company, fanboy/girl-ism, a need to rate everything down, or simply for attention (yes, it happens).  Player reviews are often seen as bias and so many other players turn to the critics for a real review.  Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore (and it's been so for a while now).  Critics, much like players, jump the gun on posting a review online as soon as possible (sometimes even before a game is out).  Critics sometimes get games ahead of everyone else so that they have more time to go through the game and review them.  The problem is that a lot of critics either play a small portion of the beginning or is given a game that doesn't favor that reviewer's preference in genre and immediately makes a hasty report of how they felt about the game before they are able to truly grasp the core concepts of it.  Critics try to be the first one to post for the maximum exposure or give a totally opposite score from the other critics so that they stand out.  This has lowered the credibility of a lot of critics, even some of the most experienced ones, from being trusted.

Dragon's Dogma has been barely out for 24 hours and it has already gotten really good reviews or really bad ones.  Sometimes expectation can ruin a game for a player who's reviewing.  If the expectations are really high, sometimes they'll give it a good score before they even decide anything or go the opposite way and realize the game isn't what they wanted and give it a bad score for not satisfying those expectations.  If expectations are really low, reviewers might just give it a bad score before they really start (which a lot of player reviews are like) or they might give it an obscenely high score thinking it's so much better than what they expect, even if the game truly lacks polish.  Other times, a critic might have had turmoil between certain publishers and already have biased views towards any game they release.

I was glad to see that reviews for Diablo 3 were mostly withheld until about 4-5 days later where critics got a chance to truly experience the game for what it is before laying down their reports of their playthrough.  On the other hand, a huge number of player reviews are panning it really hard for: the first few hours of launch when the game had connection problems, the new systems, the graphics, etc.  Players will complain about anything on a videogame: because it's so popular it's taking attention away from the game they want to play, because it has a way to prevent pirating the game (yes, having constant internet connection just to play Diablo 3 sucks, but it shouldn't be the basis for a game's score), because they're judging from the first few minutes of playing (I bet most people giving review on Diablo 3 being too easy or short only played the beta), graphics isn't up to expectation, or if they just don't like a company.

More and more, I have come to ignore both critic and player reviews as a true worth of a game and try my best to see the game for what it is myself (have gotten several games that's around an average score of 4-6 out of 10 and have given it a 7-9 in the past).  And then there's the most legitimate of all reasons for a score on a game: sometimes it's really difficult to determine whether a game was good or not.  I play all genres of games, I try to be as unbiased as possible, and I have a decent background in all sorts of history of consoles, games, genres and such; however, there are times where I fail to find the enjoyment of a game where others might find obsessively entertaining and vice-versa.  That being the case, it's still not a reason for any reviews to be based off the first 1-2 hours of gameplay.  There are too many reviews where critics (both editorial and player based) just jump the gun and give it a score based on gut reaction to the first part of the game.

So it seems like a lot of the bad reviews for Dragon's Dogma are on the X-box 360 which is fine since I'll eventually be getting the PS3 version!  And then I'll see for myself what the game is actually like.