Review scores are the bane of most writers out there today. To spend time crafting your thoughts and emotions on the game to only have to tack on a score that reflects what you just wrote is heart-wrenching to me. As a writer myself, I would hate to have all that hard work I put into what I think is a well written review of a game to have people skip to the bottom where the score is and proceed to berate me about how it didn’t deserve the score it received.
Seeing as how even producers of games are getting a little irate when getting a review score not to their liking makes me wish more people would do away with them outright. In an interview with VG247, Cliff Bleszinski showed a little disgust with the 8/10 score that Eurogamer gave Gears of War 3. Here is a quick quote from the interview:
VG247: Were you pleased with the review scores this morning?
Cliff Bleszinski: Doing great, apart from a couple of haters.
And who are the haters?
A certain gamer of the Euro.
And what was their problem with the game? I haven’t read the review.
You know, I didn’t quite gather it. I don’t want to come across as defensive. How do I phrase this properly? When people rated Gear 2 higher than Gears 3, it kind of upset me because I know Gears 3 is a better game on every level.
I understand wanting every sequel you make to be better than the last and most game reviews seem to agree that Gears of War 3 is the best in the series. What I don’t understand is how Cliff Bleszinski can “hate” on a publication for their review/opinion on his game. As long as Eurogamer can back up why the score was given, there should be no hate whatsoever. What Cliff Bleszinski should have done instead of publicly hating on Eurogamer’s review is reached out to them and try to get a better understanding of why the writer, Johnny Minkley, gave it the score he did that Cliff Bleszinski couldn’t fully get from reading the review.
In light of all this, I think this just shows even more so than ever that the industry needs to rid the reviews of scores altogether. Sure, most publications will suffer traffic to those reviews and lose ad revenue if they deploy ads in print or online. I want to believe that if the review score system is taken out of the equation, maybe people will actually get back to reading a review to understand how the game made the writer feel during his/her time with the game and get a sense of what their likes/dislikes are when it comes to them. What a shock, people actually reading words instead of an arbitrary number that is meaningless.
I completely agree with what you are saying. Not only are publishers and developers looking for the quick fix of x out of 10 but gamers are becoming lazy in the same fashion and going straight for the jugular of the article rather than reading the main body of the review and coming up with their own conclusion based on what they read instead of a meaningless number.
Personally I don’t rate/score any games I play or write about as I consider it a cheapening of the article and just an easy way out.
Exactly. What is the point of spending all that time writing a review when you attach a number to it. Reviews might as well be a blurb about the game and a number if that’s the case.
I wish the industry would try this change even if it was just for 1 month to see the difference in comments, web traffic and overall quality of the 2.
It’s a pretty established design concept in all major forms of reviewing, not just video game related. Personally I’d love to see publishers downsize the idea of number rating and concentrate more on the real substance of an article.
It’s the kind of design that creates a domino effect, 1 or 2 of the major names change their ways and you can rest assured the rest will soon follow.
A worthless pile of trash like Gears Of Bore doesn’t deserve an 8/10, 3/10 might even be too good for low – quality, bad – graphics garbage like that.
Cliffy B is just upset that his games will NEVER come close to touching the review scores of a real game like Uncharted so he decides to throw a hissy fit when people give him their honest opinion of his second – rate game.
I agree and disagree.
I do agree that numerical values in game reviews are superficial, only giving a very dim look into how good/bad the game actually is. It is a cop-out of sorts, the easy way out. It caters to those who are too lazy to scan their eyes across a screen to extract the necessary words to help formulate their own opinion. It is restrictive to an extent and does not help gamers realize what is making a game good or bad. It is depriving them of the experience of, well, experiencing the game because most gamers feel that 7 or lower is a terrible score.
On the other hand, it is a handy tool for two reasons. 1. I’ll admit it, sometimes I just don’t feel the urge to read a full descriptive article on the ins and outs of a video game. I simply don’t care if the uneven sound design on level seven influenced someone’s opinion. Sometimes, I want bullet points. Want to know why most professional presentations are done in powerpoint? Because even the most powerful of people don’t feel like reading long, verbose texts that really only boil down to one or two things. 2. Games are expensive as hell. C’mon, we all know this. Simple scores tell me whether or not I should make a monetary sacrifice to support a company to the extent I am when I drop $60 for a new game (and let’s be honest, we all think the same thing). Sure, this is not applicable to only expensive games, but the vast majority of triple-A titles out there require you to burn a hole through your wallet, not to mention the cost of DLC (optional, but still, sometimes the data is taken off the disc pre-production, or it’s even on the disc but you need a key to unlock it). There are good indie games out there for the cheap, but most gamers are too young to understand the power of something like Limbo, for they are too busy blasting away at faceless names in CoD. But at the end of the day, when I drop $60 for a game, I want to know the experience will justify the price. I can come to my own conclusion if an article were strictly word form, but this does not help all the time. I like a quick summary, which bullet points and numerical scores provide. Sometimes, I might miss an important point in an article (bash me if you will, we’ve all missed something while reading), and this can be covered by a bullet point or numbered score.
I know people might not read this, but I hope the author at least skims through it. Oh the irony if someone were to respond to me “TL;DR.” I would laugh a hearty laugh while proving a point.
I remember when scores on a review meant something. Today it just ends up being a useless thing from the past that causes more trouble than good. I also am lazy sometimes when reading a review and want the same thing you described. Unfortunately, no one wants to read anymore and take the score to be the full review without trying to figure out how that writer came to give that score. It doesn’t help that some publications throw numbers around that don’t coincide with their review.
imo, if some one is too lazy to read a review and just wants bullet points, that person probably shouldn’t read any reviews and just flip a coin. In a sense, if something personally game-breaking is missed because the reviewer “expected” it with the game and didn’t think it was all that big of a deal to them and the bullet points skipped it, the game would be purchased and anger would ensue, despite the possibility that the issue had was glimpsed at in the body of the review, and not the foot notes.
For example, the reviewer who went off on Deus Ex for the seemingly racist portions of it. Personally, I didn’t see it as such. Just as horrible voice acting. But if you are super angered by such things, and skipped that part over and just saw the nice score he gave it you’d miss out on the secondary detail that didn’t make the cut for the bullet points.
I don’t know. Now and days I tend not to read all that many reviews and I rely on my history with companies and my personal experiences with titles to decide my purchase of them. All thanks to a large network of nerds that I have at my disposal.