Review Culture is Broken

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This morning I am going to reprise a topic that we discussed on AggroChat over the weekend. Because I have specific thoughts on this I decided to attempt to dive into it in my morning post. Of note I write these starting around 6 am in the morning, so not everything may come out as intended. Essentially this past week Elden Ring released and it is quite possibly the highest rated game that has ever been released in the history of video games. There is a problem with this, and it is not that Elden Ring is not a good game and it is not that the PC version has significant performance issues. Instead it is a problem with the way games are being reviewed in general.

Video game critique lives in a really strange place given that for the most part all subjective media that gets reviewed has a relatively fixed amount of time to play through it. A movie review requires at most a few watchings of the film on an average of two hours per commitment. If you are reviewing music, it might require you to listen to several tracks more than once but again… after a few hours of listening you have compiled enough to write a very thorough review. Big open world video games however can easily consume upwards of two hundred hours of play time to really see everything there is to see in them.

Generally speaking however video game reviewers are not paid for any of the hours that they spend playing the video games. They are instead paid for the final product, the article published on the website with a embargo date associated with it. For Elden Ring that embargo was the 23rd of February and I’ve seen a few comments that reviewers got their copy of the game four days ahead of that. That means a reviewer has maybe two days to pour 60+ hours into a game and then write a well crafted review of the title and get it on the site and edited before the review embargo lifts. Everyone is fighting for the same eyeballs and if you don’t have that review on the same day as everyone else… then you lose out on those readers.

The end result is that the writer who is the most passionate about a given title is often the one who ends up getting access to it. If you are not getting paid for that 60 to 100 hour play-through… then you have to be willing to do it for the pure joy of the experience. Dark Souls in general has always been a divisive game with players tending to either love it completely, or not really understanding the hype and bounce off it quickly. So in that sort of climate Elden Ring is released, a title that is very firmly a Dark Souls game… and we have this happen. For a good chunk of the day that the game released it was tracking with a Metacritic of 100%. Why did it get all of these 10 out of 10 perfection reviews? Well it was reviewed largely by critics who were already bought into the experience of a Dark Souls game and had been waiting with anxiously for this title since it was first announced at the Microsoft 2019 E3 show.

Dissenting opinions are now starting to surface, but for the most part if you read any press those first few days you were going to assume that Elden Ring was a mus play experience. However it is very much a Dark Souls game, and will be just as divisive of an experience as any of those games. It has been called the most accessible soulsborne game, which is probably true… but it is a long way from being widely accessible to anyone who is not already bought into that franchise. If you know you are not a big fan of Souls games, then it is very likely that you are going to similarly not be a huge fan of Elden Ring. That is not to say it is a bad game, but I would personally put it probably in the 7 out of 10 to 8 out of 10 range. It is not a perfect game and truthfully launched on the PC is an exceptionally rough state with extremely high performance rigs hitting freezes in combat.

The Metascore has come down a bit and the user score is tracking in firmly mixed territory. The game was “mixed” on steam for much of the weekend… that is until it was reported and a number of one word positive reviews filed in to shift the balance to “mostly positive” territory. Metacritic itself is a problem with things like performance bonuses being tied to specific scores so that employees are actively harmed when a game reviews poorly. Video games have the same “5 stars or bust” culture that the hospitality and service industries seem to. The thing is… 7/10 games are often times the games that really stick with you because they are doing something interesting and different or are nuanced in their approach. Reviews also used to mean more than they do now… because a single reviewer can never give a full picture of the game. However when you are handing out the sole review copy to only the folks who are already bought into the shared culture of that game experience… you are going to end up with a lot of reviews that sound the same.

Once again I am going to drag the holy grail of video game review magazines into this discussion. I was a huge fan of EGM growing up… or Electronic Gaming Monthly. I used to await anxiously for each new copy to show up on the news state and later I begged my parents to get a subscription to it for me. When they reviewed a game it was handed out to four different fixed personalities, each submitting their own score. The official rating for the game was a blended average, but ultimately there was usually one of the reviewers that you found more kinship with and when they gave their score it was speaking more to your interests. This is the way that video game reviews should be done, and were all things equal… and each site an independent voice with their own tastes and willingness to show those tastes in reviews the holistic picture of game reviews would shake out to being something like this.

Instead each publication is fighting for your attention, and review copies are not something that is guaranteed. If you write too many bad reviews of a publisher, they can and have in several cases… just happen to forget to send out review copies to a specific publication. That publication misses out on the wave of google search results as folks scour the internet looking for information about a specific game and are ultimately punished for having shared their truth. Hell I have written a review before that was deemed not positive enough to see print, because the publisher in question was an advertiser. The scales are stacked unevenly right now in the favor of the publisher, because there are always going to be folks on social media willing to give praise to a title in exchange for a free key. In the EGM era there were only a handful of publications that covered games, so the publishers needed that press and were way more willing to accept a bad review.

So in the end I am not saying that Elden Ring is a bad game. I am however saying that it is far from a perfect game. The only way this game becomes a perfect game is if it is being reviewed in a deeply biased environment. It might be a game that is perfect for you, or perfect for a Dark Souls fan… but when you write a review you should be speaking to ALL players not just your chosen tribe. Souls games for whatever reason are the media darling for critics, which is in part why it is a meme to compare everything to being the “dark souls of X” genre. Again this is fine if there are enough publications out there giving differing opinions to have the blended average give a more genuine picture. However right now it feels like every single publication gave their one review copy to “the souls guy” and as a result we have this wildly lopsided situation we find ourselves in.

Video game reviews should be better. This is not a new situation we find ourselves in and honestly in large part why I take every review with a boulder of salt. The truth is my review structure is more aligned to individual friends that I know… and that they know my tastes and preferences. I will always take a word of mouth suggestion far more viably than anything I read in print or watch in a video. It cuts through all of the awkward financial incentives because a friend only really has their love of a game and their desire to share it as their mission. Electronic Gaming Monthly was very much a product of the 90s and there are some deeply troubling things that were printed within those pages. However I will always be nostalgic for the way that they reviewed games and I would love to see something like the newly resurrected G4 take on the challenge of a 4 person review panel. That won’t happen however so long as we are expecting reviews to donate hundreds of hours of unpaid time to writing that review.

AggroChat #379 – Rocket Horse Jump

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we have a blend of new topics and bumped topics starting with discussion of recent plays of Chicory, and how the musical soundtrack is phenomenal.  Ash talks a bit about how maybe there are games with too much complexity…  more specifically Xenoblade 2.  From there Kodra talks about his first major VR game experience with Psychonauts Rhombus of Ruin.  We contemplate what the heck a Disco Elysium TV Show might look like.  Tam talks about his experiences with the latest Total Warhammer game.  Finally we finish the show with a long discussion about Elden Ring and how maybe most of the game reviews are a little biased.

Topics Discussed

  • Chicory is Great
  • Xenoblade 2
  • Psychonauts Rhombus of Ruin
  • Disco Elysium TV Show
  • Total Warhammer III
  • Elden Ring
    • Problems with Game Reviews

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A Night of Second Choices

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I’ve talked about this before, but some weeks back I moved my two main consoles… the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 downstairs. The theory being when I finish working from home for the day, I need a shift in my surroundings which is why I have been spending so much more time downstairs. Now I get this is how almost everyone plays console games already, but the primary reason why this was never the case is because for me… I never felt like I could monopolize the television. Yesterday was the first real negative ramification of my decision, and reminded me of why I kept them in my office up until this point.

My wife has been a follower of Grey’s Anatomy since the show first went on the air in 2005, and is religious enough of a viewer that she used to have post show calls with friends to talk about the episode. So if I am downstairs on a Thursday, then the television is going to be tuned to ABC for a block of watching the Seattle Fire Department show and then Grey’s Anatomy immediately following it. All I really wanted to do last night was pick up where I left off the previous evening with Horizon Forbidden West, but alas for sake of marital bliss… I had to be in the same room as the very loud and obnoxious musical score of a show that loves to kill off its doctors. Granted this is completely fair play given that I have subjected her to the Walking Dead for a similar amount of time.

Since yesterday was Elden Ring day and it is apparently the new hotness… I figured maybe this was a sign for me to dip my toes into it. I played about an hour last night and I am not sure if it is really a game for me or not yet. I’ve never really attached to a Dark Souls game, and so far Elden Ring is no exception. There was also something weird going on performance wise. I am playing on PC, and I had more than a few moments of the game freezing on me. If this happens at the wrong moment… like on a boss or mini boss… it pretty much spells your doom. I might wait a bit for a patch before diving in further because apparently I am not the only one with more than enough system to handle the game experiencing similar freezing.

Instead I spent my night returning to Dying Light 2, which I am still enjoying greatly. One of the things that I do not love about the game however is that you can’t just pick a single faction. You are forced in the story to keep dealing with both. I do not love the Peacekeepers at all, and I very much do not like Renegades. However there is no real way to flip certain territories to your faction of choice. There will always been certain territories that are claimed by one faction or another. I would prefer to paint the entire map yellow, but that does not appear to be in the cards. There are certain territories that are neutral by default, and those you can flip in a specific direction. This is not stopping me from handing every power plant over to the survivors however. I have a feeling that I am just about to be forced into a situation of doing something awful… in order to save my own skin. We will see how it plays out in the end though.

Consoles and Screenshots

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There have been a few things that have changed in the way I approach games this year. The first is that instead of being the guy who never “finishes” games, I appear to be on this path of being laser focused on getting that win and moving on to the next game. I have no clue what clicked in my brain that has put me in this mode but I am riding it for as long as it lasts. Generally speaking I have been easily distracted by whatever happens to be going on in the MMO Zeitgeist. Maybe it was the abject failure of New World, a game I deeply cared about… or maybe it was my grind of all of my classes to level 80 in FFXIV… but whatever the case I seem to have been shaken out of my MMO focused mindset and spending a lot more time playing single player narrative games.

Just since Christmas I have finished the following:

  • Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade – PC
  • Witcher 3 (third playthrough) – PC
  • God of War – PC
  • Guardians of the Galaxy – PC
  • Control – PC
  • Alan Wake Remastered – PC
  • Quantum Break – PC
  • Wolfenstein II: New Colossus – PC

The other thing that has changed significantly is that I have altered my approach to console gaming. I have never had my consoles hooked up in the living room on our main television. This is just a thing that has never really happened and they have always been upstairs in my office on my main gaming display. I get that I am basically doing the opposite thing that the majority of players around the world do, but it fit my access patterns for years. However with the pandemic I switched to working from home, and my “office” upstairs has now become my workplace, and at the end of the day I need a change of scenery which means moving downstairs and either remoting back into my computer from the couch over parsec or playing one of my two next gen consoles. With this shift in gameplay has brought back the challenge it is of getting screenshots off my consoles in a reasonable manner. What I actually want… is the ability to type in a UNC path like \\playstation5\screenshots and be able to download things directly. However that is very unlikely to happen so instead we have a number of hoops to jump through.

Microsoft honestly is the clear winner here because they give me a way to download screenshots directly to my PC. Granted it is not through the current Xbox app and is instead a feature that only seems to exist in the outdated “Xbox Console Companion” app, which might be sunset at any moment for all I know. However for the time being I have able to go to Captures and then choose “On Xbox Live” and click on a screenshot and hit download. A few hoops but it gives me quick access to full quality screenshots on this machine that I actually write my blog from. Then I can do the various things that I do every day to reduce the file size and prepare them for being posted. I still would prefer a network share, but this is probably the closest I am ever going to get to that.

For Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation I employ my screenshots twitter account that I set up way back when Rift was a new thing and had added twitter integration. You can tell this because I never changed the Avatar from the Defiant faction symbol. Anyways in both systems I am allowed to attach up to four screenshots to a single tweet, and while it takes a bit… I can offload a number of screenshots rather quickly. Thanks to the miracle of PlayStation remote play, I can even connect to my PS5 and do this in the morning and grab only the screenshots I am going to actually use. Then I have to click through the tweets and save the images off… process them… and I am up and running albeit again through a number of hoops to get there.

Yesterday my good friend Nimgimli tipped me off to a function finally arriving in the United States PlayStation App. For awhile now there has been a function that has been beta tested in Canada and Australia where you can directly upload screenshots from your console to the PlayStation mobile app. From there they will stay under the Captures tab for 14 days allowing you access to them from your phone. This morning when I connected into my PS5 to grab screenshots I noticed that over night I had received this update and now had the ability to enable auto-uploads.

Sure enough on my phone I also have an equivalent captures tab, and I am guessing when I take a screenshot it will now be piped over to my phone. Nothing I had taken prior to this happening has shown up yet, so I might need to spend some time fiddling with this to get everything working. I do know that I had to change my primary console in the app, because when I first set this up on my phone I did not have my PS5. The challenge here however is that this still does not do what I really want. This will in theory give me better access to screenshots from my phone. However it would still make me jump through a bunch of hoops to get them over to my PC. In theory I would either need to hook my phone up to USB and transfer them that way, or wait for them to synchronize over to google photos… and once again download them from another website.

I get that I am very likely an edge case here… but I will never understand why video game consoles make it so cumbersome to get screenshots from the console in bulk. I think what frustrates me the most about the entire experience is that a protocol exists for this purpose already. DLNA or Digital Living Network Alliance protocol exists to provide an interoperability layer between disparate media platforms. I can already consume content ON my PS5 via DLNA being served up by my Plex Server on network, but similarly I have no clue why I can’t access media hosted on the PS5 by the same protocol by other devices on the same network. This friends is why walled gardens suck, because you can get most of the way to things working like you want them to work… but not all t he way.

If I can get the mobile app working as expected I will give it a shot, but I am still uncertain if it actually does anything to improve my workflow. Huge kudos to Nimgimli for pointing it out and that will at least give me a shot to test it.