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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.....
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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
"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.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
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.
Sometimes things aren't about misogyny and racism. I watched the video just now. The guy who made the video changed its name to distance himself from the gamergate group precisely because the video has nothing to do with them.
The video covers a case where a magazine ran an ad for a game that promised way more than the game delivered, and after publishing letters from the readers complaining about how misleading the ad had been, the game publisher threatened that they would stop advertising in the mag if they kept printing critical letters, and followed through on their threat. Then there was the magazine for Sinclair that ran reviews of several games using faked screenshots. It also covered Atari giving two magazines the exclusive right to review Driv3r (which, as the third game in a popular series, was very much anticipated and hyped) on the PS2 and Xbox in exchange for their promise to give it a 9/10 review. The magazines did so, and when the game launched as a complete shitshow, while the magazines and developers were running damage control (read: banning forum users and deleting posts, then hiring some "marketing" company/"reputation" manager to post on forums pretending to be a satisfied customer) one of the magazine's editors came out and basically said since they were playing a pre-release copy they expected bugs, and since they were told that the bugs would be fixed, they think their 9/10 score was legit.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
This isn't even a 'story'. ...which is why it's posted as an "Ask Slashdot" and not a story. "Ask Slashdot" is always questions from the readership, not a link to some piece of news.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I hate to say it but this kind of really is exactly what Gamer Gate was, at least, supposed to be about.
So what you're telling me is that under all the sexism and trolling that what GamerGate was really about was objecting to reviewers giving low ratings to a game that took years of patches to become not incredibly buggy.
Dude, you're not selling it very well.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It might cost a few thousand US$ or much more but for that sites play the game and include your own art work as supplied.
Its all in who that first trusted email or link for the game press.
Step 1. Make a good game with graphics, sound, art, plot.
Step 2. Write you life story, games concept, issues the developers faced and worked out, the completed result.
Step 3. Hire a consultant, team or company to create you press release for review sites to use.
The length and structure of the paragraphs will read well, the many images are ready, videos will be ready for a web site, magazine, blog. Contact details for a radio interview or other emerging or other media.
Color separation, dpi, resolution, web ready, video, developer photos and their stories. Does it still matter? Your press pack has it all ready for publication. Its all ready for the press, blogs, internet.
All contact information for later interviews will be correct and cover everything from phone, fax, social media, email.
Old media is new again, social media is 24/7. Bloggers and online reviewers may have huge audiences. Even political, historical or social aspects can get coverage from talk back radio or very different blogs or sites. Be ready and open to respond to anyone and everyone wanting an interview at any time.
Make sure such emails, calls and other contact information is been tracked and can be respond to 24/7 after the release. Don't expect the media to fit in with your time zone. Different media in different time zones have to be considered.
All images, art will have the correct legal wording to allow for instant publication.
Step 4. Read your review reworded with play testing and see your included great art over a lot of trusted review sites.
Some effort is needed to be print or web ready. Be ready to talk, chat or for a more formal interview.
Been interview ready to fit in with any time and different formats (voice only, video) also helps.
Translation services with some local aspect to the game can help spread packaged coverage globally.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"