When will people learn? Seriously. They keep touching fire and act equally surprised every time they get burned.
No Man’s Sky. (Great now but holy hell was it a shit show)
Cyberpunk
Diablo IV
Far Cry 6
StarField
And now this latest Assasins Creed: Mirage.
Probably forgetting plenty of recent releases too that just faded into nothingness.
Personally, I’ll be starting Batman Arkham Asylum this weekend. Heard it was pretty good. Should keep me busy for a while.
Gamers who preorder non-physical games need a legitimate intervention
If it’s not physical swag it’s just DRM’d pixels that you don’t actually own. 🤷
I know, and I didn’t pre order anything for a very long time (and don’t plan to). But unfortunately as long as some players get attracted with this kind of shitty “exclusive” the whole community will have to suffer from the companies pushing this behavior.
Reviewers won’t give anything below a 70% and marketing material is just that. Also, it rubs me the wrong way when a game’s first section is full of scripted stuff specifically to “trick” reviewers, who invariably go “WOW look at the scenic shot here!” As long as it keeps working they’re going to keep doing it. Bad ratings and record sales, why would they change?
At this point I really only watch ACG, he seems the most honest out of them all.
Seems like most reviews are afraid to say bad stuff about a game until the general consensus has turned against it.
They make money from this, and I think many feel they’ll be locked out of getting review copies if they don’t “play ball” with these companies.
I pretty much only watch Mortismal Gaming at the moment, who 100%'s every game before reviewing it, but I think with a strategy like that you’re highly biased into playing games you’re already going to enjoy, so it’s not great at finding which games are bad. I believe he has also quit games in the past if he was not enjoying them, and then didn’t review them as a result.
I think there are also other reasons that reviews trend positive - it’s probably better for ad revenue/engagement to prey on people’s hopes that a game is good, and people like for their purchases/prepurchases to be validated. Not as many people will stick around through a 30 minute review of nonstop negativity.
I like Steam forums for PC games, since they are the ones who pick up things like game having mouse issues or lack of fov options. So many reviewers completely ignore that aspect. Even ones like digital foundry might be technical, but it’s only for performance and graphics.
Actual pc gameplay quality is one users have been more informative on making me a lot of my times go wow none of these reviewers must use a mouse and keyboard, or they just copy paste their console review to the PC.
There’s no such thing as reviewers for video games. Anyone actually critical gets blacklisted quickly. It’s just more marketing at this point.
Is there anything non-indie that’s released in the last 2-3 years and hasn’t been an absolute shit show on launch?
lol I kept being like, “oh, there was…” and then remembering that it was an indie game.
God of War: Ragnarok was pretty polished at launch. There was also LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga that launched in really good shape, IIRC. Tears of The Kingdom wasn’t too bad either. Those are the only AAA games that I can think of from the last couple of years that weren’t shitshows.
Nintendo’s first-party titles are usually very polished on release (Pokemon being a notable exception). Other than that, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 are two recent major titles that I didn’t hear many complaints about, though I’m not sure if the latter counts since it released a couple years ago in Early Access.
Played Starfield so I can have memories of how it used to be. Putting it down for a year for the modders to do their holy work.
