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About the Author: Luke Stephens

26 Comments

  1. I have great respect for any reviewer which has the balls to call out those issues in the games / gaming industry as long as it is true , honest and reasonable / understandable and well explained. if its just a rant or personal vendetta or click bait thing that review can rot in peperonis.

    tbh i think , Releasing a completely broken game and not being able to fix it on launch day via hotfix / patch / update , was bound to happen at some point , seeing how many reviews be it by game journalists or youtubers simply ignore or brush over bugs and the trust bonus we give to those over-confident game devs and publishers . It was just a matter of time.

    Im old enough to remember that there was a time in gaming history where games could not have been 1st day patched , since that method did not exists yet … and games had to be done and completeable on lauch day , granted those games have not always been perfect and had their fair share of bugs / glitches which for many still exist to this day . Just imagine how devastating it would have been for a Dev Team / Publisher , if the public buys their Cartridge game on release day back in the day , that only lets you play 6 out of 8 levels and then would wipe your save file .

  2. I miss the days when games were rated on graphics,gameplay and sound. Now reviewers rate games on if they even like the genre of game they are reviewing or if it aligns with their political views. They are also terrified of giving a bad review to big companies

  3. But the other reviewers did not get stopped by this bug. So IGNs was an outlier and quite possibly very rare or even their fault. This wasn't Cyberpunk! If a reviewer encounters such a bug and it is determined to be exceedingly rare, just them and some dude you supposedly know, LOL, then you can't rage rate the game like this! Bad call man. Just don't rate it at all in this case. Rage rating is immature and irresponsible.

  4. I don't put numbers on my reviews anymore, which reduces the stress of trying to conform the content to the number or the number to the content. This incident in particular was nothing compared to Polygon's "we don't know what the fuck we're doing" review of SimCity before and after its horrible launch, at which point they changed their review policy to include provisional reviews, which were just reviews they could get out to meet day one traffic. It's actually a huge reason why I started my channel!

    One point that I think you glance but don't quite address is the value of Metacritic. If it were merely Dan having issues for IGN's specific review, the fallout would've been limited to, as you point out, perhaps his technical competence or IGN wanting to put out a controversial verdict. But to the point, because this review was a 4 in a sea of 8s and 9s and a couple 10s, it dragged down the aggregate score of the game like a turd in the middle tier of a wedding cake. Again, isolated, no one would've cared about IGN's opinions, but we have to care because they're so big and because their verdict is part of the master verdict. How dare Prey get an 82 aggregate instead of an 85 because of one bad review? That's a very precise criticism of Metacritic and the control it has over the evaluations of all media. That's something that should be explored too.

  5. Imo I think that there's should be 2 scores

    One for the game like features stories and basically an actual review

    And the other is for more personal reviews

    For example I played a game like GTA5 I like the game and what the developers does so I gave it a 10 but then what I think it really should get is something different like a 9.5 for example

    (I know this sounds stupid)

  6. New system: 8 x 0 –> what I could play was an 8, but the game was worthless because I couldn't finish it.
    Never, ever, buy a game on day 1.
    I am now waiting a year. There are enough year old games worth playing until pubs stop fucking us over.

  7. Just want to point out that many people enraged and commenting on ign reviews also have not played the game themselves or even planned to buy the game. Really shows the problem with internet commenters too

  8. This whole situation confuses me, because I've been watching IGN for awhile, and I could've sworn that Stapleton was the reviews editor. As in, he couldn't have been forced to put a number on the review because he's the guy in charge of the reviews department

  9. So, Prey is like one of my favorite games, kinda. But, I don't disagree with that 4/10?
    You're rating the game on how good it is at doing what it tries to do, right? And if the game fails at the most basic level of being a game, that meaning, being playable, that's a failed grade.
    A 4/10 is pretty fair for something that you enjoyed up to the point where enjoyment completely stopped.

    Sure maybe the bug only appeared on their copy and it's an outlier, but that means the 4/10 is an outlier just as much. Surely one 4 among a bunch of 8's won't completely ruin a games rating. But it's a very justified 4 in and of itself.
    I really don't think it matters whether it's a widespread issue or not. That's what we have multiple reviews for, right?

  10. Anyone who unironically watches IGN Reviews to see if a game is good or not is a SmoothBrain.
    If these people give Prey a 4/10 & Alien Isolation a 5/10 then don't take em seriously.
    Go to Gmanlives, Skillup, SomeOrdinaryGamer, or the man we're watching: LUKE.

  11. It’s fine to be upset with IGN but don’t harass the employees on Twitter. I’ve seen some people say some terrible things ha. These people get paid to give their opinion. If you don’t agree with their opinions, just ignore it. YouTube has plenty of great reviewers.

  12. This is actually something Joseph Anderson suggested as the correct way to review broken games. Give it a low score, stating that there's a good game here but there's too many bugs. When or if the game is fixed (and this is important), update the review to reflect the new truth

  13. Lets be fair, game reviewers are shit when they give an opinion the wider gaming community say they’re stupid idiots who have no idea what they’re talking about. But when they give a high score for a game they like, well then they’re the best reviewer they know in general or at said company.

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