Ask Slashdot: Why Are Some Great Games Panned and Some Inferior Games Praised? (soldnersecretwars.de)

dryriver writes: A few years ago I bought a multiplayer war game called Soldner: Secret Wars that I had never heard of before. (The game is entirely community maintained now and free to download and play at www.soldnersecretwars.de.) The professional reviews completely and utterly destroyed Soldner -- buggy, bad gameplay, no single-player mode, disappointing graphics, server problems and so on. For me and many other players who did give it a chance beyond the first 30 minutes, Soldner turned out to be the most fun, addictive, varied, satisfying and multi-featured multiplayer war game ever. It had innovative features that AAA titles like Battlefield and COD did not have at all at the time -- fully destructible terrain, walls and buildings, cool physics on everything from jeeps flying off mountaintops to Apache helicopters crashing into Hercules transport aircraft, to dozens of trees being blown down by explosions and then blocking an incoming tank's way. Soldner took a patch or three to become fully stable, but then was just fun, fun, fun to play. So much freedom, so much cool stuff you can do in-game, so many options and gadgets you can play with. By contrast, the far, far simpler -- but better looking -- Battlefield, COD, Medal Of Honor, CounterStrike war games got all the critical praise, made the tens of millions in profit per release, became longstanding franchises and are, to this day, not half the fun to play that Soldner is. How does this happen? How does a title like Soldner, that tried to do more new stuff than the other war games combined, get trashed by every reviewer, and then far less innovative and fun to play war games like BF, COD, CS sell tens of millions of copies per release and get rave reviews all around?

Comments

Re:Uhh. Money

[lgw]

Fly in to see and test the game. Free swag. Pictures with the hot ladies. Advertising money for your website.....

AKA: lack of ethics in game journalism.

But it's less about the bribes IMO than the simple fact that if you don't consistently give good reviews to a publisher, they lock you out of pre-release review copies. Be nice, or your review comes out a week after your competition.

The game was simply buggy

[MobyDisk]

My theory is that soldner was buggy, had bad gameplay, had no single-player mode, had disappointing graphics, and server problems.

While you point out that soldner was innovative, you don't refute any of the criticisms made of the game. So it seems like you already know the answer. Perhaps, to you, those things could be overlooked because it was so innovative. That might work for geeks and indie fans, but the general public needs things to work the first time. The game is a decade old. Even if the bugs are fixed now, it is too late to change history.

The metacritic reviews for soldner seem to confirm the criticisms. Even the positive reviews complain it is buggy.

Here's the top user reviews:

...if people will try using the online patches then they will think "hey look Söldner isn't buggy", instead of thinking "buggy piece of s**

It's a shame there's so many negative reviews, but what you have to realize is these reviews were written over ten years ago, the game is still going

Too naive to live

[hyades1]

"How does a title like Soldner, that tried to do more new stuff than the other war games combined, get trashed by every reviewer, and then far less innovative and fun to play war games like BF, COD, CS sell tens of millions of copies per release and get rave reviews all around?"

Simple. Because Soldner isn't, in a roundabout way, paying the reviewers' salaries. There's no way the reviewers can make money off it, and it's competition to games made by companies that give them money, freebies and other nice stuff.

Been that way since the 1980s

[Solandri]

Might've been that way since the 1970s too, but I was in elementary school then.

• The game review magazines (now sites) need advance copies of the games to review them in a timely manner.
• No advance copies = review comes out a week or more after the game is released = nobody bothers reading it = bankrupt reviewer.
• To get an advance copy requires the game developer send you a copy.
• If you pan a game in your review, the developer is less likely to send you an advance copy of their next game.
• So magazine and website game reviews tend to be biased in favor of the games.
• I suspect indie games are panned more partly because they do tend to be worse (low budget and all), but also because a lot of reviewers use them as an opportunity to vent their frustrations about not being allowed to say what they really think about a game.

Since about 2000 I've relied mostly on the opinions of friends and people on forums, rather than reviews. So I don't buy games the day they're released (need a few weeks or months for online communities to build up a consensus), and I never pre-order anymore. I'll still read reviews for things like features in the game (though gameplay videos on YouTube have mostly replaced that). But I usually ignore the reviewer's opinion about a game, unless the opinion is negative.

Re:Uhh. Money

[Anonymous Coward]

Fly in to see and test the game. Free swag. Pictures with the hot ladies. Advertising money for your website.....

That was a two way street. All that stuff was both expected and demanded by both sides.

Most of my game dev career was in the era of paper mags, it might be a bit different now it's almost all online, but I suspect not. We had a reviewer call us up once and tell us that our competitor that year was flying him out to playtest the game, with a weekend on the nearby ski slopes, and what were we offering. Guess who got 9/10 "Must have this Xmas" in the December issue, and guess who got 6.5/10 "Lackluster copy of (other game)" in the Februrary issue. A year later, our game was still being talked about on the forums, the other game faded away, despite outselling us 3 to 1.

Then there was the time a racing game got shat on for not having manual gearshift, except it did. I put it there myself, with the choice right on the car select screen where you couldn't miss it. Rang the mag, got hold of the reviewer, who said he had been busy, so he got his friend to play it, and his friend complained about the auto gears, so he'd assumed that you couldn't choose manual. Reviewing games they haven't even played, pretending they did, nobody cared.

Then there was the company that came within a hairs-breadth of being shut down by a huge IP rights holder because someone reviewed a pirated beta and included a screenshot of something we had removed at the last minute because we ended up not getting the license to include it. Swears that he bought a copy for review and we were just picking on the poor, innocent reviewer to cover up our evil actions. (probably because we hate women... sorry, I bet he'd have tried that one if it happened today.)

Another one, when I started out I was told that a double page ad spread in any of the Nintendo magazines was good for an extra point or two on all your SNES reviews.

(Damn, I'm stuck in memory lane now.) Yet another one, first game I did for a small company I'd moved to. The review was in the form "1 point for a well excuted feature X, 1/2 a point for a not so good feature Y" and then at the end the total was less than the sum of the review. I was told that the editor of that magazine had once gotten blind drunk at E3, crashed a private meeting, and was booted out by the owner of the company I'd just started at. So every review for that company had a point knocked off by the editor just before publication.

I've taken the names out because I can't remember who did what. It was so common that I could probably just name random mags for the platforms and have a fair chance of being right anyway. It was like that old saying I'm too drunk to remember, about never eating sausages after you've seen them being made.