A thought on professional reviews.

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.

If by "those people" you mean someone who believes there is always going to be a disconnect between the views of serious professional critics and those of ordinary consumers of culture, then I plead guilty.  But in my defense, I have to point out that I'm actually very sympathetic to the issues reviewers face.

If by "those people" you mean someone who thinks reviewers are morons, or in the pay of big publishers,  or should just be completely ignored because criticism is stupid, well then, no.  You're wrong.  But I will admit that this remains my favorite explanation of a critic's role:

ME3 is a classic, MP saved it, I'm still playing  and haven't touch SP since 2013.

Won't touch SP in Andromeda either, now waiting for 67% price drop in June because of pisspoor sells like Titanfall 2, grab it to play with some friend and carry scrubs to victory.

ME3 is a classic, MP saved it, I'm still playing  and haven't touch SP since 2013.

Won't touch SP in Andromeda either, now waiting for 67% price drop in June because of pisspoor sells like Titanfall 2, grab it to play with some friend and carry scrubs to victory.

Most of us had hundreds of hours playing SP in ME1 and ME2, after ME3 ending we got butthurt and lost fate in Biower, but a broken clock is still right twice per day

ME3 is a classic, MP saved it, I'm still playing  and haven't touch SP since 2013.

Won't touch SP in Andromeda either, now waiting for 67% price drop in June because of pisspoor sells like Titanfall 2, grab it to play with some friend and carry scrubs to victory.

I find that a lot of people who think "reviews are rigged" really think "I want reviews to be negative."

There are plenty of things in games to complain about. Give me a game I've played, I can probably come up with more than one thing to gripe about. But ultimately, a graphical glitch like the face motions in Andromeda isn't enough to turn me off of a game. Anyone who rants and raves about it probably has another reason to complain, they're just latching onto it so they don't look, well, petty.

I was disappointed by ME3. Finished it only once (and I finished ME1 and 2 many times. But I loved the MP and have hundreds of hours on it. Still, I'll probably finish SP before getting seriously into ME:A Multiplayer.

To me MP, in ME3 redeemed it. Made it one of my best game purchases that year.

Now that MEA is out and they have something else to whine about, ME3 is suddenly being put up on a pedestal to prove how far backwards Bioware's gone. It's ridiculous.

Gamers as a group are slow to forgive but quick to forget.