Review sites like IGN
ScotGaymer
Member Posts: 526
So I am sure people realise what I am going to be talking about here given the thread title.
I used to like IGN back in the day before it went all Fox Newsy on the world (unsurprising because they were owned by News Corp the same people who owned Fox News). Stopped even going to its FAQ section after last year... [redacted].
I just couldn't get past the unrelenting wall of ignorance and hyperbole that seemed to have taken over the site. I mean I knew they had gotten bad but events and articles in 2012 made me realise just how out of touch they had become. And that's me putting it politely.
But News Corp sold it a while back.
So I am wondering if the site has improved any, as I don't frequent it anymore, or is it as terrible as it has been for years?
I used to like IGN back in the day before it went all Fox Newsy on the world (unsurprising because they were owned by News Corp the same people who owned Fox News). Stopped even going to its FAQ section after last year... [redacted].
I just couldn't get past the unrelenting wall of ignorance and hyperbole that seemed to have taken over the site. I mean I knew they had gotten bad but events and articles in 2012 made me realise just how out of touch they had become. And that's me putting it politely.
But News Corp sold it a while back.
So I am wondering if the site has improved any, as I don't frequent it anymore, or is it as terrible as it has been for years?
Post edited by ScotGaymer on
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Comments
So if you are heavily in to gaming like I am, in particular srpgs, then you will probably find that site like IGN write a lot of articles which are meaningless to your demographic.
Also, paid reviews (via Adverts) and clickbait articles are certainly not unique to IGN, most of the popular gaming sites around are offenders in this regard.
I prefer fan-reviews a lot more, IGN is 100% marketing.
Well, in IGN's defense, I thought the Retake movement was a bunch of entitled nonsense, too. I didn't have much of a problem with the ME3 ending, certainly not enough to demand it get changed. And, to a certain extent, I do agree that kowtowing to such demands sets a bad precedent of allowing gamers creative power of something they didn't create. A petition to change a game's ending should be just as laughable as a petition to change a novel's ending, and yet now it no longer is because either EA or Bioware caved.
Is IGN "moronic" because some of its staff members' opinions don't align with your own? Am I, then, moronic?
@CrevsDaak
Maybe because Diablo 3 is pretty much the best action RPG since Diablo II? I actually prefer it over Diablo II because of the Rune system.
Endings that leave things uncertain are still endings. Also, I knew Tali was alive in my ending. She stepped off the ship with Joker.
Of course not. It wasn't so much what they were doing as how they were doing it. With disrespect and disdain, and to me that wasn't on. And it is only one example in a litany of examples where they figuratively fellate developers/publishers and show disregard for the people they are supposedly serving.
I've read articles on that site that my 14 year old nephew could have done better writing.
You can disagree and have differing viewpoints without being a dick about it. I would hope that even if the endings weren't a problem for you personally (I can see why you might like them), a clear majority of people thought "wtf is this?" when they got there, you can see why people did dislike them.
Also that's rather beside the point. It was merely an example.
The point is, have they improved any from that epic low point since they got bought over? Or are they still appealing to the lowest common denominator?
In response to the ME3 debacle they were dicks IMO. I only used the debacle as an example of how much they sucked in the past.
In general they usually appeal to the lowest common demoninator.
And I am wondering if they have improved as a website since they got bought over. It's not rocket science dude.
If you don't actually have a relevant response then why are you responding?
Also, being a majority has never made anybody inherently right. Often quite the opposite, in fact.
@Scheneidend
You are wrong.
Oh I don't disagree that some retakers vastly overreacted (and if you are being honest so too did some of the anti-retakers - case in point IGN). The endings weren't the worst thing ever you are right; but they can and were measured as objectively bad from both a literary and art point of view. They failed in both areas.
I won't go into the specifics here because this thread isn't about the ME3 endings, and because it's been done do death in other places by other people who are better qualified to enumerate the reasons why the ME3 endings failed as a literary work and as art than one such as I.
Where you are wrong is the statement that the retake movement didn't have the right to ask for it to be changed or fixed. They had every right.
Even if you don't agree that the endings sucked, the majority of people disagree, from their point of view the endings were broken, failed to adhere to the standard that bioware promised, and as such they were absolutely correct to ask for redress.
In actual fact the law protects a consumers right to ask for redress on what can be factually measured as a substandard product. Just because its a game that some may or may not view as "art" does not mean it is suddenly no longer a commercial product that exempt from legal protections. No matter how much you might disagree.
And while the company is equally within their right legally speaking to say "no" to the possibility of making changes; customer service 101 says that it was probably the best thing to do.
I think Diablo II was better just because there were spell trees, and in Diablo III they've missed them, the total opppsite of yours :P that's why.
I don't necessarily agree about that tbh.
Not about D2/D3 but about user reviews being better. They aren't really any better than paid reviews to be completely honest.
I mean you get as many idiot fanboys overscoring games "omg best game evar! 11/10!" because it's something they enjoy and refuse to think that there could ever possibly be anything wrong with their favourite game as you do paid reviewers giving games that clearly don't deserve it a massively overinflated score based on money and publisher pressure.
The central difference between user reviews and paid reviews is you generally don't get reviewers giving games unfair low scores (or low scores at all these days). Where as you get plenty of user reviews giving zeros and ones for stupid ass minor reasons.
Take a look at Dragon Age 2 as an example on metacritic and how many 0 and 1 score reviews it got from users for ridiculous things like the companions being "all gay" or whatever. Or the game being "boring" or the combat being "totally changed" (its actually almost exactly the same save different perks and no isometric camera).
I do agree that user reviews are generally more reliable if you take them in an aggregate sense than paid reviews are.
"art"
That's not how art works, I'm afraid.
Re:OP - gaming journalism is still bad.
Art isn't exempt from criticism.
Also thanks lol.
Also edited out the ME3 stuff in the OP. Just can't be bothered with going over the whole thing again when I only meant it as an examplar of why I stopped goin to IGN.
Moreover, I never said they didn't have the right to make a petition. They can of course do whatever they want. I only suggested they should not have, and that it was a bad call by Bioware/EA to cave in to their demands. Doing so has set a bad precedent for future titles, particularly those published by EA but also the industry as a whole.
And, yeah, I made a mistake, I meant reviews' results, but that is affected by all the trashy reviews, I know.
Thank you for clarifying your position for me. :-)
While I understand where you are coming from I respectfully disagree. It's wasn't a bad call, it was Customer Service 101. The Customer Is Always Right. Especially when he is wrong. Always. They weren't setting a precedent - it wouldn't be the first time a company has went in and changed a "bad" ending.
It happens in movies ALL the time after consumer reviews. Even the Holy Realm Of Gaming has done it, with Fallout 3 the notable and glaring example.
Other games maybe didn't go as extreme as F3 and ME3 in repairing the percieved damage of a "bad ending" but that doesn't mean that it hasn't been done many many times; a further example I would bring your attention to is Neverwinter Nights 2.
NWN2 probably DOES have the worst ending in the history of gaming. It is quite literally "rocks fell, everyone died". Now Obsidian didn't go in and retroactively take away that ending, but what they did do was alter it with the expansion pack Mask of the Betrayer so that that horrible ending was irrelevant.
Other games have done this with expansions and additional content also.
It isn't as rare and industry shattering as you might like to think.
Art criticism might not be objective (not sure if thats completely true) but you can indeed criticise the most Holy of Arts aka Video Games from an Objective point of view, so in terms of this discussion criticism is/can be objective.
Additionally I never said it was grounds for legal action (that IS an overreaction) I said that consumers had a legal right to ask for redress when they believe their product that they purchased can be found to be substandard by any reasonable measure. And as much you might like to ignore it with ME3 Bioware advertised we were getting and what they gave us were vastly different animals; and thus likely we would be protected by the Sale of Goods Act or its equivalent in whatever territory you live in. Probably.
Also getting way way off topic here. lol.
@CrevsDaak
I see what you mean.
I am enjoying the Steam User Reviews now. It's simple and easy get with. lol.
You aren't spelling my username correctly. :-P
Yeah it's better than relying on most of the so called journalism websites. The problem is two fold for them I think - most of these places are understaffed, and most of them simply don't have the time to give most games a thorough shot.
This often, I feel, means that reviews simply can not do their jobs properly. Even sites that are "good" can succumb to this problem.
I mean take The Escapist as an example, by all accounts one of the better sites, and recently they were subject to a minor storm in a tea cup controversy because they gave GTA5 a lower score than a lot of people felt that it deserved (they gave it 3 and a half stars out of 5).
And the reason the reviewer gave for giving it what in essence was a 7 out of 10?
Because he was bored with playing a gangster. In a Grand Theft Auto game.
I read the whole review and the only actual legitimate criticism of the game he had was that he felt the script wasn't quite up to par when compared to how awesome the rest of the game. That was it. And for that he knocked 3 points off its score.
I couldn't quite believe what I was reading myself. The review wasn't bad or anything, it was decently written and everything he goes over is true. And he gave it a "7 out of a 10" - a good game but not a great game.
Which is fine. But his reason for the "7 out of 10" are what boggled my mind. He gave it that because he was bored with Grand Theft Auto essentially.
I don't necessarily think GTAV didn't deserve the 3.5 out of 5 stars it got; but I do disagree with the reasoning for it. As a professional gaming journalist and reviewer he should never have gone into the review by prejudicing himself like that because it meant that he wasn't giving the game a fair shake based on its own merits and thus gave it a lower score than he might have otherwise. He should have gave the review to someone else who hadn't prejudiced themselves before playing.
And that sort of thing happens on pretty much all the main review sites. They get reviewers to review genres they don't like, or games they don't want to play, or don't give them the time to get through them (this was clearly the problem with Mass Effect 3 reviews as an example).
And sometimes you get reviewers who don't take into context things surrounding the game when reviewing. An example of what I mean would be a reviewer giving an indie game like FTL or Game Dev Tycoon a 5 or 6 out of 10 citing the games bugs, game design flaws, or other legitimate problems while failing to take into account that these games were developed by one or two people entirely reviewing them as if they are triple A titles subject to a huge QA process. An indie developer is not going to be able to offer the same level of QA, bug fixing, and support that a triple A developer can after all and it isn't fair to penalise them for that.
That isn't to say I think that professional reviews are worthless. It's just I find they need to be taken with a larger grain of salt than user reviews lol.
Kevin VanOrd, for example, has much different taste in games than Danny O'Dwyer, and even when they agree they tend to agree for different reasons. So when I see a review from Kevin for a game that he "just wasn't that into", it helps to paint a picture for me of what that game is going to be like. If Danny reviews that same game and says it was chock full of action and he "loved it to pieces", that says something too.
The old phrase, "know your source", comes to mind. Not everything on GameSpot is worth trusting, just as not everything on IGN is worth trusting. Don't trust the site; trust the journalist, but more importantly, know the journalist.
I see your point, but the thing about that is the "good" sites tend to have journalists that you can "trust" because the good sites are the ones that try and foster a good environment for both the journos and the readership.
In saying that I like The Escapist but there is one dude that works for them that I almost violently dislike. Lol. Andy Chalk. Don't like him at all.
Mostly because he is a blogger masquerading as a journalist and that irritates me. Nothing wrong with being a blogger like, it's just that he tries to pretend he isn't and it makes me wanna falconpunch him lol.
While I like reviews to be as unbiased as the reviewer can make them, by their very nature there has to be a degree of bias in there. But this dude it doesn't matter if he is doing a review, or a news piece, it all reads like an editorial or opinion piece.
And honestly when I am reading a news post about the upcoming Bioware RPG or the next Civ expansion or whatever I don't wanna read about someone's opinion about whats happening. I wanna read about whats happening.
Not been on gamespot forever myself.
Customer Service 101 is replacing products that don't work. You can 100% ME3 just fine. Customer service has nothing to do with the narrative end of an entertainment product. Nobody said criticism could not be levied against anything, only that criticism is subjective and not objective. Objectivity requires a factual basis or other indisputable foundation. For art criticism to be objective, there would have to be concrete criterion that everybody agrees upon. No such thing exists. This is why, in literary criticism, academics don't bother arguing whether something is "good" or "bad," because that conversation is pointlessly subjective. Instead, they extrapolate things like the themes, tone, and structures of a work, and support it with textual evidence.
Obviously, gaming criticism largely hasn't come to that point. Being a largely consumerist medium, and an expensive one, people want to know where to spend their money. They'll typically gravitate towards a reviewer who has similar opinions and tastes so they know if a game is worth their time and money. But, ultimately, that's all it is, tastes and opinions, subjective things. Even if you categorize the facets of a game, somebody's "terrible graphics" is another person's "amazing art style." Somebody's "terrible ending" is somebody else's "perfect conclusion." Etc.
So, nobody would take legal action, but they would use legal statutes like a Sale of Goods Act to declare a perfectly viable game substandard? How is that not legal action? How would such a law apply if the game works and plays just fine? No consumer protection act cares about or applies to the narrative aspects of a game or movie. As long as the disc works, it's not a substandard product.
Bioware advertised we were getting the end of Shepard's story, the conclusion of the Reaper conflict. They delivered. They never promised you would love it.
I also really like JRPGs, which IGN tends to bash. They didn't even give a review for Tales of Graces F because they only played the game for 20 hours (out of 50-60). Which, admittedly, I respect them for. If you've only played the game for that long, you really can't judge it as a full product, and it does the creators of the game a disservice to even try. But it's the fact that they couldn't even find the dedication to give it a proper review that bothers me.
I think that has a lot to do with the "understaffed and lack of time" problem that someone earlier mentioned in the thread. 50-60 hours is a lot of time to pour in a game, and most average Joes can't afford that kind of time. They've got jobs and families and friends and holidays and who knows what else that have a higher priority than playing a video game. Even if it's for a paid review.