Numbered Game Scores are Meaningless

 

Despite what people might say about the people who write for games review sites, review scores are still things that a lot of people pay attention to and for your average consumer of video games I can understand why.  A numbered review score is a nice quick way to see if someone thinks a game is worth your time or not.  If you don't want to risk potential spoilers or you want to go in as blind as possible but still want a recommendation before dropping some cash, a numbered score can be useful.  For example if you wanted to get the general opinion on a game like LISA, a game best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible and wanted to limit the risk of any spoiler talk or having any of its more fun plot beats ruined for you, a quick look at Metacritic or IGN (IGN doens't actually have a review of LISA because they suck shit) will let you know if it's worth picking up.

But, for as long as I can remember reviews being a thing the numbers in these reviews barely mean anything.  For example, a 10/10 is a perfect score so therefore one might assume that a 10/10 review means that the games is perfect, a flawless masterpiece meant to be played by absolutely everyone, a work of art so good in every way that even non-gamers would be able to pick it up as their first entry into the medium and have their mind blown.  Well no, not the case.  IGN gave Breath of the Wild a 10/10 review despite the game being sparse, far too easy, chocked full of filler bullshit in the form of shrines and seeds and having some of the worst combat the series has ever had thanks to shitty damage calculations and breakable weapons.  Despite its laundry list of flaws and annoyances, because it belongs to a long running IP run by a big corporation, these sorry excuses for writers will slap a 10 on it.  So if 10 doesn't mean perfect and instead just means really good, then anything under a 10 becomes equally skewed.  We now live in an era where a game that gets released and is given a 6/10 by a reviewer will be deemed by a lot of people to be "unplayable".  Just look at IGNs review of Starfield, a game that is disliked by many for being sparse, buggy and full of copy-paste jobs still manages to get a 7.  

The numbers have been skewed so hard they don't mean anything anymore.  Do you like the game? give it a 9, did you like it A LOT? then bump it up to a 10.  Did you dislike the game? 7/10, was it really not for you? slap a 6 on that bitch.  I feel like anything below a 6 is reserved for stuff that's flat out broken (or maybe not since Starfield got a 7 hyuk hyuk) or for games that offend the reviewer in some way such as the infamous God Hand review where the guy playing it sucked at the combat and didn't like the humor so he gave it a 3.  Fuck that guy by the way, deserves to be kicked out of the industry if you ask me, twat.

If you ask me, a real 10/10 game doesn't exist.  Nothing is perfect, everything has its problems.  There are certainly some games that skirt the line of perfection like DOOM, Hotline Miami or SMT 3 but even those titles have certain little things in them that pull them from that number.

But despite all that, outside of a quick reference so some punter can know if a game is worth the buy in or not, numbered reviews are generally really fucking stupid.  It is completely daft to expect a person to boil down a complex opinion on a thing, not just games for that matter, into a number.  Like I personally, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to do it, would rate famously shit survival horror game Countdown Vampires and medicore but the still impressive Parasite Eve 2 a 7 out of 10.  Without hearing my thoughts in detail those two identical numbers don't mean anything.  A lot of reviews do come with articles attatched to them but there are also a great many cases where people don't read those and instead either look at just the number or worse, the metacritic which is why the skew is so annoying

Reviews have a lot more problems than just the number at the bottom, the people writing them not knowing what they are doing, chiefly, I'm just bitching about something I find stupid while I'm sick with the flu.  Ideally, you should just ignore reviews entirely.  Look at a little bit of promo material, decide if its your kind of game or not and just fucking try it.  You don't need internet approval to enjoy a game, ignore the general audiences and just play stuff

Developers Aren't Owed Niceties

 

Right before sitting down at my computer to write this post I read an article online about how the lead developer for Starfield went on a bit of a rant because people who don't know anything about game dev criticize games that they play.  More specifically he said that he didn't like that people will speculate on why things were made a certain way within a game when they have no knowledge of the process and yet talk about it like an authority.  Which is fine, it's no a statement I agree with 100% but I get where he's coming from.  But there was a line in that article where the guy said that he doesn't talk ill of other games out of "respect for his fellow developers" and this, to me, seems incredibly daft.

He's not the only one who has said this kind of thing either, there's been a sort of prevailing attitude in a lot of gaming spaces where it has become taboo to overly criticize developers just because the process of making games is hard.  I first ran across this idea when watching Awesome Games Done Quick where occassionally a speedrunner would accuse a developer of being "lazy" and that's why certain tricks within certain games work but then these comments became frowned upon and you aren't really allowed to say that kind of thing anymore.

Obviously game development is an extremely difficult undertaking.  With it being an amalgamation of a number of art forms as well as technical ability it's fairly obvious that the process of creating a game, either by yourself or in a team, is a stressful thing to do.  But the other thing that you have to consider here is that games also cost money.  Once money is put into the equation, any requirement for me or anyone else to be nice to you over the thing you made goes out the window.  I worked for my money and then I chose, based on the developer telling me their game is good and cool and interesting, to give you money in exchange for the thing that you made.  If then, the thing that you made sucks shit then I get to call you a stupid lying, talentless asshole.  

Take my famously well documented distaste for the Outlast games.  I get that making a horror game is hard, you have to code it all together to make sure it's actually playable and then have a bunch of artists, musicians and writers create things that are scary and then all of that has to come together and be marketed and shipped.  That's hard, I get it.  But Outlast also cost me about 20 quid and wasn't very fucking good.  The writing was shit, the music is forgetable, the game isn't scary and the enemies are are not very well coded and behave like shit.  I would go as far to say that the developers are Red Barrels are inept, having completely no idea on what makes a good horror game and instead just slapping together a bunch of imagry that's generally accepted to be "spooky" and calling it a day.  It's lazy, badly made dross and I do not feel even a single pang of guilt for saying that.  You know what else those guys are? fucking liars too.  The original marketing for Outlast made it look like Mirrors Edge Survival Horror Edition and I thought that idea was cool as fuck but then it came out and it's a slow, plodding hiding and sometimes jogging away kind of horror game and it's embarassing that  I was charged money for it.  

If Outlast was made by 2 guys and distributed for free then I wouldn't be so harsh.  I would still give my criticisms of what I didn't like about it but I would assume inexperience over ineptitude or malice. But these were guys who were previously at Ubisoft now telling me to roll up for a brand new horror experience and what I got was a waste of cash.  Outlast IS lazy and poorly made and it costs money so the devs at that company who effectively stole my cash can get fucked. 

Also why not drop the ego?  There's a lot of developers I've interacted with, such as the developers for Crosscode and Benbo Quest who get defensive and insulted when you, even gently, tell them things about their games that kind of sucks.  Criticism is good for artists and creators, it's how you get better.  Back in like, 2014, I wrote a book that I published to Amazon called Noise and I shopped it around a few people I knew for some feedback.  The thing that pissed me off about this whole process is that out of the 10 or so people I gave free copies of the book to for that feedback, only ONE gave me any kind of genuine criticisms of the story.  It fucks me off to no end that everyone just told me it was great when, reading it back now, even I can see glaring flaws with it.  I'm never going to improve as a writer if people don't give me shit when my work is low quality .

I am currently studying and working on a game of my own.  I plan to release it to wherever will take it for a low price, but I'm hoping to maybe get some money for it when it's done.  If you buy it and think that it's a poorly made piece of garbage, I'm fully expecting you to call me out on that.  If you didn't like it and have some constructive things to say, that's even more useful and if you liked it and want to say something nice, that will stroke my ego good and proper, thank you in advance.  But I am not owed niceities and gentle language just because the thing I have decided to try and teach myself is hard.  If you're so fragile that you think that difficult tasks require kid gloves, even when you're taking peoples money as you do that task, then stop.  

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.  If you can't handle armchair developers calling you a lazy asshole for charging them 20 bucks for your shitty Zelda clone, then stop being a developer.  Just fuck off, the art world is worse with you in it.