Topic: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

@Maxz
Oh we can definitively say it pulled the aggregate down. Can't quantify how much, but it's 100% mathematical fact it pulled it down. You can argue it was weighted small enough that the decrease was potentially masked by rounding error, but as you said we don't know. Point is, lower scores lower the average. And it doesn't take many rogue reviewers to sabotage an aggregate.

@JaxonH Well yes, every piece of data in the dataset will have had some effect on the aggregate, however small.

What is not clear is whether any single review had enough influence to shift the final Metascore (currently 79) on its own. That is, if we removed that review, would the Metascore change? Like you say, we don’t know.

Both Hyrule Warriors and Kirby Air Ride reviewed well but had aggregate pulled down from one site which gave a 4/10 back to back for both of them.

↑ My interpretation of this was that ‘the Metascore (79) for both games was brought down by the 4/10 reviews.’

I thought the thrust of your statement was “Kirby and Zelda really should have scored higher than 79, and would have done without those 4/10 reviews from the Metro.”

This is something we cannot claim with authority.

If all you‘re saying is that, mathematically speaking, “including a lower-than-average piece of data in a dataset will lower the average of the whole dataset” then you’re obviously correct.

@Maxz You can always ask the same type of question for opencritic where we know how the score is computed (it is a simple mean average). Zelda Warriors has a 79 on opencritic and Kirby Air Riders has an 81. It should be noted that opencritic only includes about half the metacritic critic reviews for Kirby and none of the several lowest scored reviews (or the highest one) so it's not quite apples to apples.

The scores on the two sites are generally very close even though they use a different averaging system and choose different subsets of reviews to include.

@FishyS This is really interesting! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I’ve always tended to neglect Opencritic because… everyone always talks about Metacritic, but they do seem a bit more selective in their choice of which reviewers to include, and the non-weighted average is nice and transparent!

@Maxz Personally I usually start at metacritic because opencritic sometimes doesn't include as much data and some games don't get scored. I find the metacritic website to be a little easier to navigate and sort as well. For major games, the scores are usually close enough not to matter much, but when the scores are wildly off, it means something weird has happened with the score distributions and I often trust the opencritic score a bit more in those scenarios. I look at metacritic when I just want to read the main reviews and I look at both sites when I'm interested in the statistics.

Side comment, but the 'player scores' on both sites are bad, but in different ways. Mario Kart World is a good example - the critic review scores on the 2 sites are 86 versus 87 so close enough and they look at 131 versus 141 reviews, with most of them being the same (in this example opencritic actually has more). However, the metacritic player score was review bombed and recieved 6.9/10 with 2,861 scores, with player reviews such as 0/10 'TOO EXPENSIVE'. The opencritic average player score is 9/10, but there are only a few dozens scores and some of them are still obviously troll reviews. I would trust the player average score on Nintendo Life much more than either of those (it is 8.2 with 979 votes which definitely includes some troll 1/10s but... at least not nearly as many as on metacritic.) It's anyone's guess whether the player score on metacritic for Prime 4 will be review bombed low for some imaginary slight, will be artificially pushed upwards by some fan community or will actually be honest.

For the record, I don't particularly pay too much attention to...honestly most reviews in general, let alone Metacritic. At most I quickly look at the score to see if I find a surprise, either positive or not.

Some people hate Metacritic for that but...eh. I think I'm right that a great Kirby Air Ride will never be reviewed as well as a good Metroid Prime, since despite the original being my favorite game ever, I prefer Air Ride slightly to even 2 and 3 (even if part of that is that absolutely that they are follow ups to my favorite game, while Air Ride was a one-off until this year) and that says...something. But in general my tastes are not too wild most times. Like my hottest take on a game is that Vanquish was like...a 6. Even Star Fox Zero is not as dramatically better to me compared to reviews as what you'd assume by how much people hated it and that I actually liked it (though that's partially because games rarely get mid to bad reviews, compared to movies or the like). I'm not gonna say that every Ubisoft game sucks, even when they're samey and cynically made (though I will for Outlaws because its funny and based to hate Star Wars) and I'm not one of those people trying to convince the world Travis Strikes Again is secretly a masterpiece. I'm gonna buy what I'm gonna buy and its incredibly rare I regret spending money on a game, I'm rarely an outlier for any game.

Yeah, I agree that it’s not worth getting too het up over review scores in general. You’re probably going to get a general idea of what the game is like (and whether it suits your taste) from watching a bit of gameplay footage, and then the actual words in a review do much more heavy lifting than the score when it comes to giving an impression of whether you’ll actually enjoy it.

That said, it’s fun to piece together what you’ve seen/heard pre-release and try to guess what the critical reaction will be just from that.

…At least, I find it fun, anyway!

Statistics and weighting aside, I think a lot of people just fundamentally don't "get" aggregated review scores.

A game sitting at 50 on Metacritic isn't necessarily a bad game. A lot of the time it's a game that's highly divisive when you look at the spread of positive, neutral, and negative reviews. You have to take both of these into account, as well as the quantity of scores.

A highly divisive game is one that doesn't please the majority, but it might still be one incredible game if its systems, art style, and/or story hits the sweet spot for you, more so than any game that appeals to a broader audience.

Here's a practical example for me: Phantasy Star 0 on DS. It sits at a 71 metascore with 16 (48%) positive, 15 (45%) mixed, and 2 (6%) negative. On the user score side, it's lower; 6.6 with 9 (47%) positive, 7 (37%) mixed and 3 (16%) negative, but user scores are low in quantity and also usually more volatile.

Pantasy Star 0 to me with good friends to play locally with was an incredible game. In 2009 this was like having our own little "MMO-lite" in handheld form we could play anywhere, whether it was sitting in someone's flat, in a park, or wherever. And it was so much fun. But I also think 71 is more than fair because it has a lot of flaws that will be more detrimental to some people. And if you don't have friends to play with, it's quite a diminished experience unless you really jell with the online play. It is, in other words, not a game for everyone. But in its case, like many others, it means for the people that do enjoy it, it's so much more because of that strong vision. You can't please everyone.

50 isn't supposed to be bad. Think of Nintendo Life's definition in their scoring policy: '5/10 — Average
A middle-of-the-road title'.

That said, a metacritic score requires a fair amount of reviews from fairly major reviewers and, generally speaking, major reviewers don't review bad or even average games very often so they simply don't have a metacritic score.

Let's think of less than 50 as below average games. Even if they are slightly devisive, almost all reviewers have to rate fairly low to get in the 40s. For 2025, only 4 games got metacritic scores lower than 50. Only one score got below 40 which is where Nintendo Life would define 'bad' and given that the highest review score for that game--MindsEye-- was 5/10, the metacritic was 37, and the player score was 2.5, I think it's fair to assume most people would probably agree it is bad. Some people complain that almost all metacritic scores are above the 'average' 50 but, for 2025, there were 415 metacritic scores but there have been 10s of thousands of new games across steam, mobile, and consoles. There are countless bad games in there which never get much in the way of reviews.

By NL's scoring definition, 71 from your example is firmly in the 'good' category.

Really when people complain about games in these forums - whether Metroid Prime or Kirby Air Riders - it is generally because the game doesn't have what they want personally or because it doesn't hit the insanely high peaks of quality we know Nintendo is capable of or perhaps doesn't feel worth the high prices. But even though I don't plan to buy e.g. Kirby Air Riders for $70, it would be dishonest of me after playing the demo to say it wasn't a fairly high quality game. There are so many insanely good games that people have skewed expectations sometimes.

p.s. Sorry for continuing the tangent on metacritic scores but this thread is kind of a waiting room at this point so hopefully it is not too disruptive even though it is barely on topic.

11 days to Metroid Prime 4

@FishyS
Kirby Air Riders is actually a great example.

I bought it, and it just wasn't as fun as I'd been hoping. It's good, don't get me wrong. But it's not to my personal taste. And yet, I gamechatted with Nath the other day and he says he absolutely loves it and can't get enough. Like, it's just his jam. And I can understand that even if it's not mine.

It's not a bad game, but it is for a certain niche. And if you're in that niche, it's a 10/10 for you. You're gonna adore it. If you're not in that niche (like me), it's like a 7/10. Totally depends on who you are, really.

As for Metroid, I am precisely the niche the game is aiming to cater towards. A huge fan of metroidvania game design, massive fan of gyro and mouse aiming, someone who appreciates good performance and visuals (doesn't have to be AAAA, just pleasing to the eye with solid performance), and a soft spot for well voice acted dialog and personable characters. I also like engaging story in games. And even though Nintendo isn't usually the company you think of when it comes to story, I do welcome more of it in games like Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, Zelda and Metroid.

Reason I love Tomb Raider so much is it has fun, quality gameplay and engaging story with interesting characters. And some light metroidvania design. You spend much of the game alone, but it still manages to splice in certain segments with other characters, it sometimes has dialog over the radio to keep you engaged when it's been a while since the last time you were with anyone, it just kinda does everything. It's not the best gameplay ever or the best story ever or the best metroidvania design ever or the best tomb puzzles ever, but all of these aspects are high quality and when combined, makes for a really engaging game.

I'm excited to see Metroid Prime finally offer more than just excellent gameplay and puzzles. There's room to do what Tomb Raider does, and add those interesting characters well voice acted, add more interesting story that takes more of a prominent role (even though it'll still likely be backseat to the gameplay overall), up the ante with more intriguing puzzle design using the psychic powers, improve on the already excellent gameplay with even more control options like mouse mode, refine what's there and already established, and integrate some of these other pillars that can make a game feel more well rounded.

@JaxonH I don't disagree with a thing you said but I do also think Air Ride isn't niche just because of what it is but also how best to experience it, in my experience. At least for me, Air Ride rarely was worth playing for more than an hour at a time. It was consistent short runs across a couple of years that made Air Ride a highlight of the GCN era, when my first times playing it made it seem like a decently fun but lower tier first party release. Whereas a Metroid Prime I'll gladly play for 2-3 hours at a time, possibly more if I really wanted to (especially the GOAT original). It being a consistent, reliable game to go back to IS part of the appeal, a more important one than even a lot of other party games I'd argue.

I feel somewhat similarly about super short games. Mario Land 1's appeal to me is that it is really short and I can just play through it in the span of a half hour or less, and that unique appeal is why I think it holds up despite probably not being as good as other classic Mario games, it hit a specific niche other games usually won't. Hyrule Warriors is the opposite extreme, it is a neverending grind fest of a game where you go through battles countless times, and you either get into that as a regular thing or don't. And in the case of Hyrule Warriors and ESPECIALLY Air Ride, that's a disadvantage for reviewers since they can't play it that way and get a review out in time. The fact that both recent entries have good reviews at all is impressive just with that in mind alone.

@kkslider5552000
I can see Kirby Air Riders being designed around quick play sessions, and tbh, the Top Ride is my favorite part. It's also perfect for impromptu MP passing a joycon. Which, that kind of game won't suit most suitations when you game, but I think it's important to have a few games like that on deck for when the situation presents itself. Mario Kart World is another great one for passing a joycon in tabletop mode.

I don't regret buying KAR, I just recognize it's not a game I'll play all that much. But sometimes you just want a low stakes in-and-out gaming session. It's great for that.

Metroid Prime 4... I'll say this. Metroid Prime is what got me into gaming as an adult. I'd watch my brother play all day- 8 hours in a single say. Morning to night time. When he finished, I bought the $99 Platinum GameCube bundle with MP, and got Metroid Prime 2 since I'd just seen the entirety of the first.

And I played 8-10 hr sessions day in day out. I was literally having dreams about the Ing. Idk if Metroid Prime is designed for such long play sessions, but it's so good you can't help but binge. Very much like Tomb Raider for me now.

I suspect Metroid Prime 4 Beyond will be my obsession for a week or two. But part of me will never want it to end, so I fully intend on dragging my feet, backtracking multiple times and exploring every nook and cranny, to make it last as long as possible.

I largely agree, but would simply add that I think all of that involving calculating the confidence interval based on the total number of reviews is kind of pointless. Its swamped in impact by how "noisy" the data itself is, which is to say, the bias of the individual reviewers. No amount of statistics can make data that is more precise than the original measurements.

Which is why I think a Rotten Tomatoes "freshness rating" is actually far more useful, as aggregate scores go. The fact that the individual measurements are binary and, to any reasonably expected extent, unambiguous ( a reviewer either recommends a game or not )? Is a huge improvement in useful data, with all the hypothetical tradeoffs in detail being fictional.

@metaphysician
I think the confidence interval would make sense for user reviews on this specific site because you never know if a game had 3 user reviews or 30. So saying a game scores an average of 87 +/- 9, vs another game that scores an average of 87 +/- 2, would be helpful. I don't advocate for such a system with aggragate sites.

The things that are holding it down for now are:

The bike sections, that also look bad graphics-wise

Escort missions, especially with a annoying "marvel" character. I really don't get it. Everyone seemed to hate the talking characters in Metroid Prime 3 and Other M (not me though), yet Nintendo includes this. The "marvel character does look annoying though, I have to admit. That being said, it annoys me more that Samus stays quiet when others talk to her. Hello, we live in 2025! She talked in Other M, wich I personally didn't hate.

And this is what annoys me: The world is just broken up into smaller (potentially more lineair) levels, with a desert in between. Why not one big maze like Prime 1 and 2?

Honestly I probably agree with this more than the other complaints. I don't hate this idea, but its never been better for a Metroidvania than the alternative, that I can think of anyway.

Prime 3 was probably the best example of it but I just prefer a proper interconnected world.

Prime 1 and 2 weren't really one big maze. They were actually pretty linear with each area simply connecting to the next.

Not that it bothered me, nor does the hub design of Prime 4 which is essentially the design of Prime 3 using the ship. I never cared about how areas connected, only that exploration and level design within each area is well done.

edit
Upon further reflection, I retract my previously stated preference (or lack thereof). The prior Prime games were a nightmare to backtrack in because of the linearity of areas. If you wanted to go from one to another, it could sometimes result in directly backtracking through 3 areas tip to tail.

This hub design in Prime 4 ensures that will never happen. Which will make backtracking less tedious, which will result in a higher quality experience. The bike will help even more- not only are all areas connected to a centra desert area, the bike drastically speeds up traversal.

When you're running a 3D game on a console with a tiny amount of RAM and limited rendering power, of course you're going to be building your map out of a lot of small rooms connected with long corridors and narrow doorways to attempt to fool the player into thinking that it's all seamlessly joined up. Rather than it just being a delaying tactic while it's frantically trying to load the next area from disc before you go into it, with an occasionally slow-to-open door being the closest that you get to a loading screen. And that's most of why MP1&2 are the way that they are.

You still that get in a lot of modern games too, albeit to a lesser extent, but I'd think that it's reasonable to use the advances of the intervening decades to do things a little differently with MP4, albeit hopefully not in a way that ruins the atmosphere of the game.

@JaxonH That's a wild amount of assumptions about a game that's not even out yet. We have no idea how good this system will work. From what we know, instead of backtracking through interesting areas in the past where maybe there's new upgrades you can reach etc., whereas from what we've seen of MP4 and what you're praising, we'd be backtracking through a big empty boring desert instead. And you assume it's better. As the kids would say, that's some heavy hopium.