Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Negative media reviews. Bad reputation?

But they can, all they have to do is register at MetaCritic, a fact that makes it absolutely worthless when I'm trying to evaluate the quality of a product.

The problem here, from where I'm sitting, is that we have people that look at what the critics on Rotten Tomatoes say, and believe it's gospel, and people that look at what the consumers say, and believe it's gospel.

However, if I'm looking to buy a game, I don't run straight to IGN, or GameSpot to see what they think of it. I don't run to Steam either, since I won't be using Steam to play it. If that's the only way it's available on PC, I'll pass. I think I mentioned this earlier, but I got this through GoG, or I wouldn't be here, and if the final product was only going to come through Steam, I'd pass. I do, however, trust what my friends might be saying about it. Even if, at the end of the day, we disagree. I at least know they aren't motivated by clicks. For example, I haven't clicked on a single link provided in this thread. I have also refrained from commenting on their content, since I have no idea what it is. I refuse to add to their view counts. Too many 10/10 reviews on games that I know personally sucked, and too many "this game sucks" when they mess up mechanics, or think it's "too hard".

I don't see the problem: just bribe them like everyone else in the industry does if you want better review scores.

Well, apparently every game ever made is solidly downvoted and should not be purchased. In fact, every product of ANY kind is solidly downvoted and should not be purchased. Because there are BILLIONS of people who have not bought everything ever made, so I guess those billions have "voted no" and we need to count their votes. So never buy anything again. Billions of people can't be wrong.

Recently, I've found a lot of times mainstream reviews tend to dislike things for the exact reason I look toward a title. Granted the example that most easily floats to mind is a movie review where critics complained that Godzilla: King of the Monsters was decent fights, but had a terrible plot and completely implausible technobabble...to which I went "That's what I look for in a Godzilla movie...." and I went to it and, hey, look it was exactly what I expected and loved about a Godzilla movie. Cool fights, stupid plot, and implausible technobable. Mainstream reviewers don't really seem to be in touch with what people are looking for in a game.

I look to the reviews of players more than media, and even if I hadn't enjoyed the game a lot already, most of the word of mouth on this game is good.

See now you're just being ridiculous.

If a vendor is selling hamburgers, and a potential customer who eats only hamburgers all day everyday decides to not try your hamburger, that SHOULD be very critical and useful information to that vendor. By contrast, if a vegan passes on trying your hamburger, that is irrelevant data. Determining what is your POTENTIAL customer base is a critical and foundational element of any business venture.

We could do that, we could flip the script too, and buy everything, because billions of people have.

Realistically, we can all do what we do already: Watch our various "trusted" outlets. Mine don't happen to be professional critics, or game journalists, in the strictest sense. Some people are going to take these "reviews" at face value, and to those people I say "Well duh". I mean, the Steam store has a warning on the game's page from the developers telling you that EA is going to be an unpolished buggy mess, why should I click on a "review" that's not going to tell me anything Larian didn't already tell me? I've seen them sycophant it up for some developers, even when the game is truly bad, why do I want to add to their revenue stream for an EA title? I don't, and further, I won't. I also won't be reading/watching anything they have to say post launch. I'm not interested in what they have to say, because from my end, they are more influenced by what they get from developers, than whether it's any good or not.

I will be watching game forums, with a grain of salt. Because I've seen game forums implode because they didn't get what they wanted, so the game was doomed out of the gate. DA 2 had it's issues, to be sure, but it was nowhere near as bad as the community would lead you to believe. The same is true for Andromeda, although I could never reproduce some of the bugs that were featured on YouTube, despite spending hours trying to, because I wanted my own video of them. DA 2 was doomed out of the gate because "not the Warden", and Andromeda was doomed out of the gate because "not Shepard, and Mass Effect is Shepard's story". I was 45 minutes into a review before the reviewer actually said that in his review. I wish he would have led with that, so that I'd know that, if I was going to spend all that time, I'd at least be aware of his bias before hand. Of course, because clicks, he didn't do that, so he got to seed that algorithm. We could write what I'd imagine would be a rather accurate copy of a "review" of this EA by simply reading the topic titles on this forum alone. I wonder, how close to a 1 to 1 reproduction would it actually be?

So trust who you want. If that's dedicated game "journalists", or even players. For myself? I'm not going to trust game "journalists", and I don't fully trust players, but at least with the players, I can get some context from posts/post history. If I try that with game "journalists", they're all going to be as useful to me as MetaCritic, which is to say, not at all.

sanc·ti·mo·ny
/ˈsaNG(k)təˌmōnē/
noun DEROGATORY
the action or practice of acting as if one were morally superior to other people.

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.

GotY is about as useful as the oscars, academy awards, junos and all the other glorified awards in various industries. CDPR is the current darling of the gaming industry but they will inevitably fuck up and will be vilified, rightly or wrongly, from then on just like Bethesda, Ubisoft, 343, Bioware, Blizzard and so forth and so forth. This is the internet, hatred is the currency. Inquisition and Andromeda had some impressively shit development if you look into them, "Bioware Magic" I believe was the term. Andromeda was at best middling and followed-up on what was generally considered a disappointing end to the Mass Effect trilogy. Dragon Age Inquisition was a weird one where, I personally had no problems with it, people just didn't seem to like it as much as previous titles. Dragon Age 2 set the stage though with really bad game design, the whole "not the warden" was a typical internet screech the reality was that game was cobbled up and shot out for a quick buck. This was back when a bunch of the bigger developers got it in their head that they needed to produce their IPs yearly.

Other disappointing "Triple AAA" games can include:
a) Halo 4,5
b) The yearly Call of Duty which only occasional makes large improvements but combine with massive monetization
c) The Battlefield series general decline as well as Battlefront 2's bad launch
d) Kingdom of Amalur. the studio straight up imploded with all its issues
e) No Man's Sky, it has improved but that's because they kept working on it for 4 years to get it to a good state and even then there really isn't a ton to it.
f) Fable 3
g) Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Something being called Triple A is pretty meaningless and is more an excuse to charge more for less these days. Now some of them are calling their games or studios as Quad A, which truly is a joke. Ubisoft on the other hand continuously delivers what, I believe they themselves call, Double A games which are effectively the same game with a new skin pulled over and yet a lot of people keep buying them, just like sports games.

Ratings, reviews and classifications are all fairly useless these days, don't know why anyone values it. (How is this a feedback thread?)

That is true. Eventually a company cannot keep the quality control across all the franchises. CDPR is at its peak now and only future will tell how established they will become.




It is media feedback. They complained about similar things like in this thread (rest mechanics, companions personalities) and endorse that is not just "vocal minority".

The problem is that it's always the vocal minority. Yes media can influence the silent majority but its not like they actually speak for them. Look at movies and games that get glowing reviews from critics and then fail completely when it comes to the everyday consumer. Most people will just look at something, maybe look into it a bit, then decide if they like it or not and move on. The other thing is a lot gaming journalists are effectively just random people voicing their own opinion on a site that happens to give them more "voice" I suppose. You can say IGN or Forbes gives decent reviews but then there's sites like Kotaku, which I don't know how they exist still. They're not all Jason Schreier, who does investigative journalism rather than games review. It's not like they run polls and interview people for their thoughts on a game. They're just people giving their opinion more loudly than the rest of us.

I am not disagreeing... but what follows? What sort of review would actually be of value?

Back in the day, I used to follow Desslock's reviews on GameSpot, for no better reason than that his opinions had a proven track record of matching mine. Is this all we have?

Damn, that's a cold line. Someone could drop some bars around that.

I would say that Gamespot/IGN are even more influential than before. Larian even referenced IGN in their Twitter account. Of course Streamers have their share, but mainstream media is still influential.

Media can stfu, especially Mainstream/Lamestream Media.

Political correct NewWorldOrder employees will soon face the consequences when their leaders will go to jail.
We will CLEANS THIS WORLD from these wannabe winners.

Hmm, hmm. Going to have to ask you to tone the social media rhetoric down, this is the Larian forum not reddit, 4chan, twitter, or facebook. That said, the day social media dies, if it ever does, will be a good day.

If you don't even buy the game, you don't play the game. Unless you pirate the game. Which can change minds. And lead to pay.

Basically, people might judge a book by it's cover (for better or for worse). But until you ACTUALLY play a game you can't even have a well informed opinion. Because you didn't play it. You simply avoided it due to an assumption and missing context you have not discovered when playing the game. Unless that game is very very alike to a game you already played. But I don't think we can apply that with BG3. At best all you can really do there is WATCH a game. But WATCHING Markplier play Five Nights at Freddy's is MORE entertaining then ACTUALLY playing it for me. His responses to weird shit happening makes it more fun and entertaining.

Dues Ex human revolution got a 9/10 score. Or a 10/10 score. But the ORIGINAL Deus Ex does some things MUCH better then human revolution. You will also note that in human revolution you have some police at the start of the game but at NO point will they ever fight ANY bad guys outside of purely scripted interactions (and even then they still don't. UNLIKE in the original Deus game where you'll have them fighting in the streets against terrorists.

So anyone giving the human revolution a 10/10 clearly can't see the flaws of where there's room for improvement. If the original game did something better and a game under the same series does it worse and pulls the "They're there but not actually there" move (which is something we too many older games did) then I have to subtract a point for that. If a previous games in the same series did it BETTER then that's a deduction.

But I only know this because I played BOTH games. Especially the original. It has the right "mood". It doesn't feel "Hollywood". It builds up suspense. Lets you feel dread. Hearing from Helios is plain creepy at first. You also had to go against your own team at times. Wherever or not you kill them is up to you. It actually felt like "I discovered something and now they're all after me because I know". And eve your own team won't know because they're simply following orders. And some of them can be convinced to stand down or team up with you.

Man. They don't make them like they used too.

Why people talking about Hades here? I mean, it's completely different game, a different level. I mean, I played Hades in first day EA. The game is pretty good for its genre. But it doesn't have anything similar to genre and complexity BG3. You can't have bugs with cutscenes in a game that doesn't have them.

Also gamespot is snowflakes, meh.

‘bobobob my mate is evil!!!! Help!!!! He was rude!!!’

Plz? This is why in some new games I don’t have favorite character. Too much virtue and ponies.

Hades is widely regarded as one of the best game releases this year, so in the context of games that had successful EA processes, Hades is very relevant.

You sound churlish.