A thought on professional reviews.

You are asking for way too much from some people.

If you want Graphical Glitches

What is that from Final Fantasy?

Anyway what is a professional reviewer, Someone who gets paid for their opinion right?

It might be a little more complicated than that.

Take a look at Mass Effect 3 as a great example of that complexity. Do that exercise for yourself. Imagine that you're judging the game as a professional reviewer, as assertive as possible. You take everything into consideration, story, structure, conceptual design, gameplay, mechanics, sound, music, and how it all fits together. How would you judge ME3.

Now try to analyze it as a gamer, as a fan. It's a completely different approach. Sure, as a gamer, we can also judge the game based on all those artistic and technical factors. But the feeling, the atmosphere, takes first stage. And that ending, inevitably, contaminated our judgment of it.

As a game, ME3, with all its merits and its flaws, is a good game. If you accept it for what it is, there's a lot of fun to be had from it.

But at the time, that disastrous (imo) ending, shattered it all. It truly did. And then, the entire game was judged with brutal scrutiny.

The "professional review" issue is also interesting and complex.

First, it's true, msm gaming sites are sensitive to their sponsors. So if a big publisher sponsors a certain site, that site will be careful in the way it reviews the publisher's products. Sponsors are the client, not us, gamers and viewers. We're the product.

Now imagine you're a professional reviewer. You work on a gaming site, and you start gaining visibility as a reviewer.

PR folks will want to establish a good relation with you, especially AAA Publisher PR. And so you may gain access to early previews, and interviews with the developers. You then start getting invites to venues, paid travels and hotel room. You are awarded with gifts. You have access into the industry, and that access gives you a leverage as a journalist, because you can go places others can't.

Now, imagine, the time has come for you to review a big title from a big publisher you have a great relationship with. If the title is good-not-great, you may be okay with being slightly over-excited about it, and give it a great score. Why the hell not.

But imagine this is a big expensive game, that sucks. What do you do. You write a brutally honest review - and risk being excluded from the club, with all that implies. Or you whistle into the air, and make it look better than it actually is, writing a dishonest piece, from a customer perspective?

Interesting, right? That's the problem: a structural issue with the social dimension of mainstream media.

And that's also why YouTubers (with all their flaws, we know) have risen and are now one of the most important voices for gamers. YouTubers have also learned from past mistakes, and, now, we probably rely more on them than on main gaming sites. Sites are for news and previews. But when it comes to real advice, you want a gamers opinion first.

I was kind of saying that their opinion is no different to ours really only difference is they're paid to give opinions. I didn't mean they were getting paid to give positive feedback or anything. 

"Anyway, again like ME3, I don't think we will have a accurate review of this game until "real people" have finished a play through and begin posting their opinions"

Who would be those real people, you? Not the critics then?

Christ on a cracker. Imagine running into this in a dark alley.

Yeah, but according to the internet it probably isn't as bad as what they did with Mass Effect: Andromeda.  My favorite launch bug with Unity was the haystack that is near a spot you end a story mission and you couldn't exit the bale of hay.  You needed to reload a save and hopefully find another way down.

Game critics rarely finish a big RPG or open world game before writing a first review.  They just do not have the time.  They are all in a rush to hit deadlines that fall a couple days after they receive their copy of the game.  If they've spent 7-12 hours with a game, they've spent a LOT of time with it.  But fans of this particular genre know that usually just scratches the surface.

So for this sort of game, genuinely accurate reviews that encompass the experience of the entire game are not easy to find.

And critics, in any medium, just don't experience stuff the way ordinary fans do.  I'm what publisher's marketing departments consider a hardcore gamer.  I buy over 20 games a year (easily) and spend significant amounts of time on roughly a half-dozen "new" titles, and a similar amount of time on "old" titles.  And I've been doing this a long time.  I can bring a large frame of reference to bear when judging a game.  But for me this is all just for fun.

Reviewers are clobbered with covering well over a half dozen of these things a month, a lot of them appallingly bad.  And they have to crank out some coherent pages of prose describing each of them.  On a deadline.  For low pay.  It MUST drain a lot of the fun out of it.  IF they get to spend 8 or so hours in a game that is actually FUN, its flaws are probably pretty forgiveable as long as they remember to mention them.  They also tend see things I might consider FUN about 10 times as often, and think of it as cliched cookie-cutter same-old same-old.

Plus, they review games.  Life has got to be an uphill struggle.  Do you think any of them has a mom in the retirement community bragging to her neighbor that "My son reviews video games for a living!  We are SO proud."  That's got to affect their attitude sometimes.

In my experience fan reviews are essentially worthless because I have no way to sort the quality of the fans. Not just for games, for anything. I'm much more likely to get useful input from a critic, particularly one from one of the more elite publications. Harder to apply that strategy to gaming, though I generally trust the A.V Club guys.

Seems like most YouTubers liked ME3 despite its ending.