Prey, the newest game from Arkane Studios, is most enjoyable when you take your time exploring its corners and crevices. It’s a quiet, unsettling game, one that can turn into a real drag if you try to rush. So why did Bethesda force reviewers to blaze through the game as quickly as possible? And what kind of lasting…
“Your Washington post for Christ’s Sake , not a 12-year-old’s diary,” reads a recent internet petition about Uncharted 4. “Treat the game with professionalism and respect.”
Metacritic, an aggregation tool used in equal part by forum trolls and multi-billion-dollar publishers, has long dominated the review world. Now there’s a new site that hopes to take its place.
Bugs in Fallout: New Vegas might have eaten your save file. Maybe they took away a few hours of progress, or forced you to reset a couple of quests. Maybe game-crashing bugs pissed you off to the point where you wished you could get your $60 back. But they probably didn’t cost you a million dollars.
QUOTE | "Nobody here ever bothers about Metacritic. We think of it as irrelevant, quite frankly. We only concentrate on what the users think." - Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley, explaining why they don't worry about Sniper Elite getting low scores from reviewers.
Today, the gaming website Eurogamer announced plans to ditch review scores, joining outlets like Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun in Fighting The Good Fight against the arbitrary and meaningless quantification of video game quality.
Now that the end of the year is here, everyone is starting to declare their "game of the year"—and Metacritic has now thrown its hat into the ring.
QUOTE | "We've basically seen Metacritic all but become obsolete right now... We get obsessed with it...but it doesn't really matter, as far as the sales of the game." - Double Fine COO Justin Bailey, talking about what things have and have not influenced the sales of their games.
Normally, if a new release is lacking in some way—be it in terms of quality or because of bugs—the developers will simply patch the game. But in this case, the situation is so grim that the developers are starting over and redoing everything.
The immensely powerful aggregation website Metacritic just got a little more powerful, partnering up with Amazon, the biggest online retailer in the world, to display Metascores on video game pages.
Add Deus Ex and Epic Mickey creator Warren Spector to the list of people who think the video game industry should stop caring so much about Metacritic.
A study looking into the hidden formula that drives Metacritic made headlines this week, but Kotaku has discovered some critical errors that call it into question.
Industry favourite Metacritic, a site which aggregates review scores, does not simply add up every score it can find and come up with an average. It weights scores, giving some outlets more of a say in the final aggregated tally than others.
Earlier this week, Metacritic bemoaned 2012 as a year of poorer review scores for video games than the one preceding it. Fewer titles surpassed the all-important 90—which practically guarantees job security to those who developed or greenlit the project—than in 2011. Interestingly, the three console platforms' average…
The cynical among us might say that all the games we played this year were 'awful.' Fewer titles reached a score of at least 90 or higher in 2012 than in 2011, after all.
The freelance reviewer who wrote a video game review that was pulled by GameSpot—and kept on Metacritic nonetheless—says he's sorry for the mistakes in his piece.
If you head on over to the Metacritic page for Natural Selection 2, you might notice something strange. Of the seven reviews listed, only one is scored below an 80.
It's easy to sit back and scoff at "review bombing," as we saw last week when Blizzard released a broken Diablo III. Flooding Amazon to give zero stars to something others have called a perfect 10, sure, that's not a legitimate review. And people staging a sit-in aren't there to legitimately patronize a public…
In an interview with Gamasutra, Tim Heaton, the studio director of Total War developer Creative Assembly, described their development process as Metacritic-focused and "brutal."
Last night, Obsidian's Chris Avellone tweeted an interesting detail about his roleplaying game Fallout: New Vegas.
