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.
Excellent post. I regularly defend the concept of “reviewing” against claims that reviews are de facto biased or dishonest or just plain useless. In part, that’s because I have a strong, almost ideological belief that reviewing is an art and an end in itself, not a consumer service. Reviews shouldn’t need to justify their existence by being anything other than entertaining. That said, however, I, like you, am old enough to remember when it was entirely reasonable to make purchasing decisions on the basis of reviews because it was possible to come to know the preferences and tastes and blind spots of a number of reviewers, between whose reviews you could triangulate. That came from seeing the same names, week in, week out, in printed publications. I think that baton may have been passed to streamers, since people can and do follow several over time as they play and talk about the same game but in what passes for print journalism now, I’m not at all sure it’s even possible.
One (or some?) of the German games magazines sometimes had this where at least 2 people were named as the reviewers for major things and often it was “A likes it because… and B dislikes it because…” and for all of the downsides of those magazines in the 90s and 00s.. .this was pretty good, because it often was actually more honest. E.g. If they review WoW when it comes out there might have been some EQ1 curmudgeon lamenting that it’s so polished and mainstream. But that’s a valid criticism if this is you, and a nice contrast to “OMG BEST MMO EVER”. (contrived example, but you know what I mean)
And that screenshot with all the 10/10s… I would’ve thought it was photoshopped, or we have the game of the decade here? 😛
At least one German magazine still does that, M! Games (formerly Maniac Games). Not for every review, mind you, but the bigger ones always have two, sometimes three different authors’ opinion pieces in them.
Unfortunately it’s for console games only, no PC. I’ve been subscribed for a very long time nonetheless, and still am, as it’s just a very good read. And they do a lot of retro stuff too, which I love.
I feel really old now.