Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@Maxenmus @Pizzamorg You also have to remember that some reviewers just do very silly things and unfairly judge the game for their own mistakes.

I'm not a huge fan of Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated, but even I have to admit that the Gamespot review of the game was flat out stupid. A 2/10 for something that was entirely on the reviewer is horrible.

Assuming the review isn't just flat out making stuff up, a review cannot be wrong, as it is simply the opinion of one person. So when a contrarian goes into a comment section, tells the reviewer they are wrong and shares their completely anecdotal experience as evidence to this apparent "wrongness". I dunno what is worse, that these people are all trolls or people no longer understand what criticism is and can think critically.

Either way, this is the difference between being a contrarian for attention and simply sharing the difference of opinion. If you think your opinion invalidates someone else's, I have no time for you.

I personally love the game Biomutant, I think it got a really hard time from critics, but I ain't gotta tell any reviewer to rereview a game because I exist in a world where things can only be a 1 or a 10 out of 10.

But an opinion can be misinformed, and therefore wrong, just like how my opinion that you were calling out people with different opinions might've been wrong.

But I do agree that trolls like that do exist. I think more often than not though, they're just speaking out emotionally rather than trying to "troll." People get upset when games they like get trashed. I don't judge them. Not everyone's trying to be a contrarian or troll. Some people just have poor emotional management, like me.

And if they do provide an anecdote at all, I think I would listen to them more than just a one-liner "hurr durr you're wrong, go screw yourself"

The likelihood of a trained media person doing a review being misinformed versus random joe on Twitter is very small. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I am sorry first name bunchanumbers, your opinion sadly holds less weight to me than a publications does, no matter how many times you comment they are wrong.

But yes, otherwise, that is exactly the point I was making. Absolutely cannot stand people who make defending bad videogames their personality trait. If you just go about your business liking poo games, then that is up to you, but if you spend time in your day going to reviews that don't agree with your stance and attacking the publication, you can get in the sea.

Hah, clearly you trust the media more than myself, but okay, that's your prerogative.

I think that likelihood is higher than what you implied here, especially when game reviewers do get paid to say good things about the product they're reviewing/endorsing, which is why I try to remind myself not to trust reviews anymore. Between the opinions of individuals like you and me and the opinions of massive faceless publication companies, the former hold more weight for me. Heck, I'd take YouTubers over IGN/Gamespot any day, though they do become shills too.

Maybe I'm just old, but it is pretty obvious to me when a review is paid for versus when a review is genuine. If anything, smaller YouTubers are likely to be less genuine, as they will want to hold onto their partnerships, so they will be kinder.

You do have a point, and I agree. I think it's difficult to prove genuineness because you don't know what the reviewer is thinking (unless they get ousted for accepting bribes, of course). But that's why I would much rather trust someone's opinion if they've gained my trust first; individuals form that trust much easier than faceless corporations. YouTubers earn that trust by repetitively posting reviews you feel to be fair and genuine. In fact, smaller YouTubers lose out on subscribers by having unfair or inaccurate opinions, so they're not invulnerable either. Losing out subs as a small YouTuber is a career killer for YouTubers; clickbait views alone won't float your channel. Furthermore, if they do become shills and post blatantly untrue reviews, they get called out on by other YouTubers anyway. YouTube does have its own community where they actively called out one another.

And I think that's where the trolls you mentioned comes in, when they feel obligated to call out on publications that they feel are constantly writing unfair reviews that don't feel genuine. Again, trolls do exist, but some people are just so passionate about voicing out against something they think is unjust that they come off as "angry trolls online."

I think Dunkey made a strong point that people don't know most reviewers on sites, so the entire face of a particular review is usually the site and not a person. Which to me points to both the site overwhelming any relevance of the person reviewing it (possibly intentionally, so they can remain disposable and not deserving of better pay) and also to the person reviewing it not writing anything all that unique. I've been on gaming websites for nearly 20 years now, and nearly all of them are a blur of some person on some site agreeing with the consensus or having a hot take once.

Though I also think the only time traditional reviews have helped a video game much is if it was an unknown or heavily dismissed game before release that then consistently then get high numbers. Not even acclaim in reviews, just the numbers being very high.

My pet hate would be metascores.

It's like taking a bunch of reviews, throwing away the most useful part - i.e. the opinions of the reviewer - and aggregating the almost meaningless leftover scrap that's the headline score, as though the result is some sort of meaningful metric that can be used to compare games across widely different genres.

Sure, games where the consensus is positive will tend towards high metascores, and you'll get the opposite for ones that are widely considered to be bad, but that's about all it's good for.

I like going on Metacritic and finding the outlier reviews for games though. A single contrarian can usually tell you a lot more that's useful than those who form the consensus.

@Matt_Barber I don't take Metacritic as seriously as I do IMDb or even Rotten Tomatoes, since I just read individual game reviews from sources I trust.

Playing Realm Royale Reforged recently, I'm reminded that Realm Royale is a much better battle royale than Fortnite IMHO. I'd say underrated too.

While the two look similar, mostly Realm Royale had some fun ideas that make the game fun. For example, instead of crawling in the down but not out state, you become a chicken. Run around as a chicken for 20 seconds and you come back up to three times. Map too big, you can ride a horse and move faster. Got a weapon you don't like, turn it into shards and craft a better weapon.

Also, spun-off Paladins, which is cool as Paladins is one of my favorite online games.

I think review scores in general cause more harm than good. They mean well, but it seems like many people can't operate with a system that doesn't put everything into an either "worst ever" or "best ever" set of binary boxes.

People will also often latch onto a number on a review, then pull examples of other games from incomparable genres that scored even lower, or higher, like this somehow "owns" the reviewer and proves they are somehow "wrong" to give the score they gave. People also really seem to struggle with the numbers 6 and 7, the reality is most media is a range of fine, okay or average, so the majority of things will get those scores. Fours and below and nines and above should be reserved for truly special titles in either direction, true masterpieces and truly broken pieces of junk, but people seem to not understand how to process these things in what I think is a very basic framework. And this whole time they've never once actually read any of the review which gives the number context, either, which is probably part of the reason they struggle.

I also think singular outlier reviews aren't helpful either, when the consensus is generally negative and a bunch of publications start popping up with glowing reviews, those are usually the clearest sign of reviews which have been paid for, rather than someone offering a genuine take. It happens with people, too, when a game is doing badly and suddenly people start flooding Metacritic with 10s, I know to ignore those opinions entirely as they are clearly paid for bots.

That said, player narratives can form that go against the general critical consensus and they can be interesting to follow. A somewhat recent example for me was Destiny 2. That game got 8s and 9s out of 10 on release. The reviews were never "wrong" per se, but many reviewers only had time to stick around for the campaign and a little post game activity and they based their review on that. But like with any game of that nature, end game is where the game actually starts and that game utterly collapsed in on itself at that point (at that time, things are very different today) and you deffo got a much better perspective of that title from those who really spent time in this endgame systems, than you did from any of the reviews that only focused on the campaign.

I think in this day and age where reviewers are spread so thin and there is always something new they need to review, long term investment titles like ARPGs and Looters are probably the things that suffer the most in getting properly reflexive reviews. That is probably the one time I would prefer to find YouTubers, as you want the thoughts of someone who has put in hundreds of hours at the hardest of difficulties, minmaxing and pushing against the systems as hard as they can to see how resilient they are and you ain't gonna get that from your main gaming outlets.

@Pizzamorg Another reason I would prefer to take the word of YouTubers I trust than even the most "reputable" publishing companies is because the writers and editors of those companies have a superior they report to, be it the head/CEO of the company or even the shareholders. YouTubers, especially smaller YouTubers who haven't become big enough to become partners, don't have that restraint. They don't have to report to anyone, so they're not obligated to follow a company agenda. While I'm sure that the ideal is to have writers/editors write fair reviews without interference from the higher ups, I doubt the reality is that idealistic.

Something both YouTubers and big companies share though is the concern of image. This is where biasness might come in, because they might give certain games a better score to craft a more positive image of their brand/company, thus attracting the readers/viewers they desire. As an example, maybe a publication or a YouTuber that wants to focus more on AAA FPS games/RPGs would give JRPGs and visual novels a more unfair score because they wouldn't really care what that does for their image, because they're not chasing that Japanophile crowd and are more interested in the more popular American AAA games. But maybe they're obligated to review certain JRPGs anyway because those games are trending, or because the company sent them a review copy, so they just churn out a shoddy review and call it a day.

I think at the end of the day though, the most honest review that could exist comes from yourself, which is why I wish more digital stores would enforce the refund policy that Valve has offered on Steam. And even Steam's refund policy isn't perfect either because you only have two hours of gameplay to decide if the game is right for you (not to mention that you couldn't mass-buy games and not play them for two weeks because the refund policy is voided past two weeks upon purchase). Honestly, that's why I stick with physical games. If I find that I don't like a game, I'll just sell it on eBay or something, at least earn some of my money back.

@Pizzamorg You can still learn something when the only positive outlier reviews are from publications that you've never heard of and are free of any kind of criticism at all; it's just that you've found a game that nobody at all really likes.

Still, I'm thinking more of games like Weapon Shop de Omasse - which was widely panned on release - but is now regarded as a somewhat quirky classic. One of the few positive reviews it got was from this site, even, and didn't exactly read like Level 5 had slipped a brown envelope of cash under the table.

More often than not though, it's the negative reviews for a positively received game that'll set my alarm bells ringing. I'm pretty sure nobody's getting paid to hate on games, especially from big publishers, so when a respected reviewer sticks their neck out it's probably going to be worth reading what they've got to say.

The thing for me is that, because I avoid games generally disliked by people or any brand new AAA game not made by Nintendo (I just played Arkham Knight this year, hello!), and because I tend to like games that people like in genres I'm even kinda into, I've almost never been in the vocal minority compared to game scores. So things have usually worked out fine there for me. Or at least the exceptions are so rare I don't know of them right now. So the score is in fact, the only thing I usually have use for. I'm not saying that's a good thing outside of for me, but that's just how things have worked out.

Except that Paper Mario: Sticker Star was reviewed better than Kirby Air Ride and Star Fox Zero. That annoys me a lot.

The thing is though... how much do we let game review scores condition us into buying the games big corporations want to do well? Putting aside games that have obvious game-breaking bugs, if we let hype and review scores dictate how we buy games, then what about the less popular and less hyped games, particularly indie games? Would we be acclimatized into only buying games that million dollar publications bothered to talk about on their website, or even acclimatized into playing games everyone else likes if we're only going by user review scores?

I'm glad that Sean Murray didn't let the barrage of negative news coverage and review scores determine the kind of game he wanted to make for No Man's Sky. But it just goes to show how tough making and selling a game can be. You have to chase popular trends instead of creating the game you want. And you can't just make an "okay" game anymore or your game will receive a 6/10, not sell as well as other games, and therefore making it harder to continue making games with your limited budget. You can't just go, "I just want to give my gamers a good time," you have to "reinvent" or "improve upon" previous gameplay. It's tough.

@Maxenmus
I personally don't care with review score.
Games are very subjective for each people.
A game with score 97/100 can be a 0/100 if the people don't even like that game, not by bias.

@Anti-Matter We say that but the moment a game comes out that we like we'll point at the Metascore and say "see? It's a good game!". Humans like to change their minds.