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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?
Fly in to see and test the game. Free swag. Pictures with the hot ladies. Advertising money for your website.....
Not everyone values the same features in the same way, and it's really really easy to make assumptions. Complexity vs simplicity, replay value vs. seeing everything the first time through, etc. Variety doesn't give an inherently better experience compared to something well polished. Really tiny changes to things like matchmaking can vastly change the experience, and really small UI stumbling blocks, can actually be a massive frustration; not because some users are dumb, but because they want something with literally zero frustrations in the limited time they can play. There's not even anything inherently wrong with players who really like shiny graphics. If that's what they enjoy, then good on them.
Even assuming that more accurate physics makes a more playable game seems pretty disingenuous.
Food critics will pan KFC, but if it is exactly what you are aching for RIGHT now it will be hard to believe people wouldn't eat it everyday. It doesn't make the critics wrong, but rather that tastes vary.
This happens with everything. Movies, books, music... With a large enough population of players there are bound to be some who enjoy games that most of the world didn't enjoy, add then you have some that are just overlooked.
The article may as well have asked "Why do some people like games that other people hate and vice versa??"
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
This is pretty much the posterboy article for "ethics in games journalism". But there seems to be little ethics, and more importantly, not really any games journalism.
In the past, when there was sort of a thing as games journalism, it was because there were very few media outlets for discussing games. You had some magazines with nationwide distribution, and that was about it. Since many gamers took their queues from these magazines, the magazines had a motivation to provide a fair environment (their subscription fee or face value of magazine), games companies had plenty of motivation to give them early review copies (they would have their game covered before it came out, building hype), and they had every motivation to buy advertisements (perfectly targeted ad).
Once everything went online, this broke. First, there's too damned many "game journalists" now. Because it's interesting and fun, there's no shortage of willing games journalists and bloggers. Since some people just come for the hype, a reviewer who just sucks every cock poked at him will do just fine in the marketplace, and someone who just generally is genuinely entertaining can do even better. This means that there's no reason for a game company to treat any given magazine, fanzine, blogger, or website even remotely fairly. Second, no one is paying subscriptions any more. Not only are some people willing to do it for effectively free ("brand building"!), plenty of places are entirely ad driven. That means that their readers are no longer part customer, part product- they are now entirely product. Third, the direct interface of the web has dramatically hurt the entire idea. Not only can I got directly to the developer's website and read their promo or ad copy to my heart's content, I can also find people on the very first day discussing it in forums.
Games are a product, not a natural phenomena, not a political opinion, and sometimes not even art. How can you call covering a product "journalism"? It is quite fair to call it advertising, even if the writer wasn't directly paid to shill the product, even if he didn't get it early, or for free, etc.
"Games journalism", if it existed, would look like Consumer Reports. It would be subscription only. The testing would be done blind. The reviews would make some attempt at being scientific, with space for editorialization (especially needed for the artistry that games often have, and dishwashers normally do not).
But that doesn't exist, or I've never heard of it.
So some shitty games get massive press because they pay for it, one way or another. These companies don't keep around their marketing departments for no fucking reason, after all. They don't drop dollars on ads for no reason either. A lot of this also makes an errant assumption regarding gamers and their reasons to game: while some are probably seeking The Best Experience, others just want to have fun with their friends, or with a broader group of acquaintances- for them, finding a popular game will be more rewarding than finding a masterful one.
If you, personally, want to find a game to play, you have more tools than ever. You can look at the now decayed husk of the games journalists of the past, you can read the ad copy, you can find promo videos on youtube, you can confine your google search to reddit or voat or whatever, you can follow a youtube personality who has similar tastes to you, and some games even offer a trial period where you can determine whether you like it or not. It is frustrating if you try to fit the square peg of last century's comprehensive and mostly neutral point of view advance reviews into the round hole of a constantly updated online product that markets other products to you from inside itself, but it can be more reasonable if you widen the net you cast, which is vastly easier than it used to be.