I don't see the problem: just bribe them like everyone else in the industry does if you want better review scores.
Not that I am defending them, but most recent AAA have failed.
Interesting, but let's have a look at why some of them have failed. For this post, I will be ignoring games that were genuinely bad, and I'm going to point out an interesting dichotomy that may well put this game on that list:
It's too much like an MMO. This one should be posted ironically, considering it's putting the cart before the horse, but it's out there, and games like Dragon Age Inquisition got hit by it pretty hard. Despite that, it didn't really fail, per se. It did get some GotY awards, after all. What's even more ironic is that some of the same mechanics that exist in Inquisition are in the follow up GotY, The Witcher 3, but it's lauded as one of the best RPGs ever made... So there must be something else, right? Read on:
It's not what the players expected. This one is really hokey to nail down, because expectations are the most subjective metric to base a game's success/failure on. It's ripe on these forums, even now. We'll start out with something that's really hard to quantify: It doesn't feel like Baldur's Gate. I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, and if we asked people where they couldn't read what someone else said, we'd get thousands of variables to try to plug in. Way too many to even attempt to list here. So I'm just going to point to it, because it's there.
It's not what players wanted, which is even harder to nail down. This game is doomed, because part of the base is looking for "more DnD, except sometimes it needs to be less DnD", for things like dice rolling, especially in regard to fail states in conversations. Some people are going on about too much like DnD. We even get some overlap in the one listed example for this. Along with things like how it's TB, which is really strange, given it's advertised to be that. It's not unexpected however, as paying attention to advertising, actual marketing, not reviews, is something that gamers tend to struggle with. For my best example, I'm going to use Aion, which was advertised as PvPvE, from the first time we heard of it until now. Yet, I was in a legion of 200+ accounts that moved to RoM, because of PvPvE...
Then there's the crossover things, like how Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda were doomed out of the gate, because of 2 and 3 collectively, with some 1 sprinkled in. The second* and third games in DA were both hit hard by "not the warden", despite being informed that the Warden wouldn't be making a comeback, because there's a very real possibility that some players had a Warden that was dead at the end of Origins. There was also a lot of pushback against the protagonist not being the OGB, because the Warden could be dead, and thus, no OGB, or just flat out refusing the ritual, even if another of the Wardens there can end up dead instead. Andromeda had similar issues, with the caveat that they shot themselves in the foot trying to do too much with the game initially, which wound up meaning that they got a lot less out of it than they could have otherwise. It got hit hard by "Mass Effect is Shepard's story" though. I've listed my experience with one "review" that waited until it was about 45 minutes in, gotta seed that algorithm after all, to state that very claim.
*DA 2 had it's share of problems as well, but was colored out of the gate with "not the Warden". I'm not trying to defend any of the games listed, nor am I trying to tout their awesomeness. Ironically, I have several complete runs of DA I, but have never finished any of the The Witcher games. I bought all three, because I respect what CDPR was doing for gamers, and wanted to show my support of that in order to encourage more of it, and have even pre-ordered CP 2077. I sincerely hope I'll be able to finish this one, but, if I'm going to base my experience with CDPR on their previous titles, I won't be able to. I'll try though, and even if it's not what I'm looking for, I won't refund it, because ultimately, CDPR still puts us first, a lot, and that's worth supporting, even if I'm not a huge fan of what they've done previously.
