If it's worth anything to you guys, Shinobi just posted that Mock Reviews for ME:A are good.

Mass Effect 3 showed the faults in Metacritic and frankly they lost my faith in their reader reviews because they haven't done anything to try and fix their flaws.  They had to delete reviews from the Mass Effect 3 user reviews because they were copy and paste to influence the score and it was a well know thing that with Diablo 3 people were trying to get the score for the game to be the same as the error code that was on launch day.  If I want to see a review from a player I am more likely to go to YouTube or Twitch when I see them playing the game so I know they have experience with the game at hand and not someone with an agenda.

On the facial animations thing, I'd like to quote someone ThoseDeafMutes from Neogaf:

"Every Mass Effect game has had terrible looking goofy animations in parts. And yes, it's perfectly fine to half ass parts of your game that are on screen for half a second in a 40+ hour RPG.

I'm one of the most vocally negative people in every mass effect community thread but even I'm starting to get tired of this "find 15 frames that look shit and post them in every thread" level of nitpicking. Yes, that disarm animation looked bad. Yep, that punch doesn't connect. If people can't get past this I don't know how they got through previous games in the series where Mark Vandermeer spent half the trilogy looking like a sex predator whenever he smiled and holding sprint gave you an animation straight out of the ministry of silly walks."

Let's assume ME:A is actually getting underwhelming feedback from mock reviews, and things aren't looking that good. Wouldn't Shinobi be more inclined to not even bring up mock reviews then? As far as he and people on Neogaf know, he has a good reputation of accurately leaking information and dates out. It would probably do him more harm than good to say "Hey guys, word on the street is really good over here!" when in fact they're not.

"middling or average game" isn't enough to start "wurst game evar" hysteria.
And all good drama still isn't diluted to no substance at this point. Well, for me and wurst game ever camp.

Your right, it has glaring flaws. But one still can use it to see if game received universally good/bad reviews. Not all games has agenda-warriors, but if they do you can be sure as hell there is something off with the product.

If you want to look for a person that took the time and gave a well rounded review then I would agree or you can find a game that doesn't have people with an agenda to modify the score then sure it is worthwhile.  The problem is if the game does have any type of agenda attached and I feel all BioWare games do at this point I can't have trust to know that the score really reflects people who are playing the game for a score of 6 or 7 can be obliterated by a person that posts 10 reviews all at 0 because they don't think the female protagonist is "hot".

I'm gonna be honest and say I really don't care what the reviewers think. Unless a game is universally panned (like < 70% across the board) I find that "professional game reviews" say almost nothing about the game. On the other hand, I do care what a few trusted youtubers, bloggers, and series fans think.

While seeing the overall metascore might be helpful for Bioware (although I'm fairly certain that regardlesss of its quality MEA will have a negative user score, unless it's exceptional), but I don't really care about it. I think it's more useful to find reviews where, even if you might not agree on the score, you can form a reasonable opinion on the game when you read it. I know which one will do the trick for me.

I think they might use the gold version. I don't think they have time to prove, at least from the start, the game with the patch.

Good and great at interchangeable? Must be a different dialect of English than what I'm used to.


To each their own but I find metacritic user ratings to be just about the most unreliable rating on the internet. There is too much gaming of the system going on, a lot people seem to lack any objectivity, and most seem to have trouble grasping a ten point scale leading to most 'reviews' being 10 or 0.

Only aggregate user rating I can think of that I'd put any worth in would be the ones on Steam. A lot more people leave a rating and the fact that you have to own a game to leave review helps it a lot too (can't just create multiple accounts to rate).

Arkham Knight PC
Metacritic: 2.6 based on 1997 reviews
Steam Overall: 58% positive based on 26314 reviews
Steam Recent: 83% based on 389 reviews in last 30 days

Fallout 4 PC
Metacritic: 5.5 based on 7544 reviews
Steam Overall: 78% based on 59001 reviews
Steam Recent: 77% based on 1,362 review son last 30 days

Neither is a flawless game, far from it, but neither is as bad as Metacritic's user rating would suggest and it's not like Steam is just more optimistic, it can still be brutal, No Man's Sky PC for instance
Metacritic: 2.5 based on 1918 reviews
Steam Overall: 31% based on 81627 reviews
Steam Recent: 35% based on 562 reviews in last 30 days

Shame Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, or Mass Effect 3 isn't on Steam

Neogaf shills can't be trusted.

I was thinking about this, how they hell are Bioware going to manage that? Launch Day is the 21st, but Bioware want the Day 1 patch out and ready by the 16th, which is Early Access. So that would mean Bioware would have to have the Day 1 patch ready even earlier than that, so reviewers can play the more polished version right? Seems nuts to me.