I know this is human nature and this is nothing new. It’s absolutely impossible to make something that everyone is happy with, but what’s the need to be so destructive?
I recently finished The Callisto Protocol and in my opinion it’s a great game but I remember people saying that “The game was so bad that they (Krafton) had to give it away (PS Plus) for someone to play it”.
Oddly enough I probably like to contradict most people because another game I’m interested in playing is Immortals of Aveum and when I read one or another review people say that “It’s just another generic dead game, like those generic trash Netflix series”, I mean, is it really necessary to be so destructive? And I want to clarify, I don’t give a shit what people say, if I like a game and I enjoy it I don’t mind paying full price for it, and if I don’t like it, I just don’t do destructive reviews.
What I least understand about the gaming community and what I find most toxic is when they criticize others for playing something they like, like the phenomenon of criticizing Genshin Impact players or in the past the same with Minecraft. Do I commit a sin by playing something I like?
Pro tip:
Don’t immerse yourself in any community because you love the thing.
Love the community. Love the thing. Love them separately.
I LOVE melodic death metal and progressive death metal. I don’t wanna meet other metal fans. At all. I want to meet people who like what I like but not because what we both like belongs to some more amorphous superset.
You can love Tupac and hate hip hop. You can love Opeth, and hate Opeth, and still love Mikael akerfeldt, and still kinda hate him. You can love snowboarding, and think the culture is cringe.
Don’t let the people who love the things you love make you feel differently about the things you love, unless it’s those people you love or something? Idk. Crowds of people are dumb as fuck. Ignore them.
Most of what you’re describing is just review bias. Reviews are usually only left by people who either had a very positive or a very negative experience. Strong opinions are also more memorable and tend to get more attention.
The Callisto Protocol that you played now is not how it originally released. It was patched and tweaked a lot.
Also the gameplay is flawed. See the combat system with more than one enemy and it gets wonky. One of the changes was exactly to make enemies less aggressive as before they would often gang up on you and lead to frustrating deaths.
I like The Callisto Protocol a great deal as well, but it is a game flawed in what matters most: the gameplay.
I mean even from a core concept, melee with big animations just seems like an odd way to go for that style of game as you point out with multiple enemies. Also its brain dead simple unless they have changed it where you just go left, right, left, right. So difficulty setting basically just goes down to how tanky is this enemy (which is a pretty common way to artificially inflate a game’s difficulty).
I don’t think the statements you cite are destructive or toxic. They’re just negative reviews. If you truly don’t care what people say then they shouldn’t matter to you.
As for the charge that a game is generic and you enjoyed it, well think about it. A game reviewer has to play hundreds of games a year. They’re constantly playing games. If a game is like other games they’ve played it’ll be boring for them. You on the other hand as a player probably don’t play nearly as many games. So it’s less likely that a game is like other games you’ve played. Even if it’s similar to other games you probably haven’t played them so to you it’s new.
There’s nothing wrong with people having different opinions about games and expressing them in their own language no matter how mean it may sound to you as a fan. If you had fun with it, great.
I’m a game dev and have been a gamer for all of my 35 years on this earth.
The real issue is anonymity. People are not themselves online, especially not in game (not that I advocate for less anonymity). It’s completely out of your control and best not to expect too much of it. Have your own fun.
Like that idiot who ripped out the Banksy stop sign an hour after it was revealed. We just can’t have nice things, it’s always been this way and always will. Poverty, injustice, discrimination, group dynamics, mental health etc… all contribute to the mix.
I highly recommend a documentarish thing on YouTube from Dan Olson called : Why it’s rude to suck at Warcraft. Very relevant to your question I think.