IGN, GameSpot, and several other sites that review PC games gave Empire Total War extremely high marks. The reviewers said the AI is greatly improved, that siege battles work better than in previous TW games, and lots of other happy stuff besides.
But from what I can tell by reading comments from people who bought and played the game, ETW is pretty awful. I read that the AI is trivial to beat on Very Hard, and makes exactly the same boneheaded mistakes it made in M2TW and RTW. And I read that there are gamebreaking bugs that no one could fail to notice if they had played for any substantial amount of time at all.
I’ve had this experience with a few other games in the past. (Spore comes to mind.)
So this is just pure paranoia, I’m sure, but is it possible some game reviews are bought by the game developers?
Less paranoid: Do reviewers sometimes just phone it in, knowing from industry buzz that the reviews are going to be great anyway and so just writing a glowing review without having really played the game?
The state of gaming journalism is widely known to be piss-poor. Even when there are not direct kickbacks, the journalists and industry are so deeply enmeshed that the major journalists will always be little more than boosterism. They pay each other’s salary. I mean, not many people are going to advertise in a gaming journal other than game producers, right? So it’s best to think of the major sites as the propaganda arm of the gaming industry. There are some good independent sources of game reviews, and it’s probably best to use those.
I know just enough about book reviews for libraries to be dangerous.
In general, book reviews are not paid for. The reviewer gets a free copy of a book or something, not really enough to make one say a book is good or crappy. But, journals don’t like to publish reviews that say that books are crappy. And if your review doesn’t get published, you don’t get a reputation as a book reviewer and you don’t get opportunities to review more books.
So you come up with creative ways to say " this book isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread".
I’d be surprised if some of the same market forces don’t govern the game review world, but I’ve been surprised before.
FWIW, Eureka, in the game world, the advertisers are in the gaming mags are all the people getting reviewed, and some will pull ad funding if their crappy game doesn’t get a good review.
In this particular case, Empire comes from a company well-known for releasing games unfinished, then fixing them a couple months later with patches. A lot of the hatred comes from people who know this, expect it, and then scrutinize the game for mistakes and issues when released. It’s called confirmation bias. I’m not saying that the mistakes and issues aren’t there, nor apologizing for the system that releases unfinished games, just pointing it out. No Total War game released will ever get a fair review from the people who’ve been burned in the past, because their minds are already made up.
Of course it’s corrupt. And it’s personally frustrating to me.
One of the things I do is run an online game review/opinion site. Yay for me. We make some money.
But we’re constantly running into the expectation that a good review can be purchased. I’ve even had it stated blatantly such as “Hey, our game is coming out on X and we’re wanting to buy some ads. It’ll get a great review, right?” and suchlike. There’s not even the slightest shred of expectation of honesty in the process.
Makes sense to me-- I think some of the same dynamic is at work in the world of book reviews, but it is my sense that the biggest games and the biggest game producers make up a much smaller group than the biggest books and the biggest publishers do, so pressure to publish a positive review is greater.
Most major game-reviewing media sources have been full of shit and advertising dollars for some time, now. Some of it comes from the fact that reviewers are often given exclusive, unfinished packages well before the release date and expected to make their decision based off that. Other times, (see the Kane and Lynch debacle) there’s some pretty unapologetic ass-kissing going on - and really you can’t expect it to be any different. When EA buys four full-page, full-color ads in your magazine they expect a few sweaty wadded-up dollars to pad any criticisms you might level at their title.
The continuing trend of game titles is away from the “hardcore gamer” market who wants flawless mechanics, steeper difficulty curves and endless multiplayer replay towards something more similar to a blockbuster film in which the viewer expects a set length (generally 20-30 hours for today’s title) of entertainment for the price of admittance - and just like Hollywood it becomes critically important to whip the consumers into a frothing anticipatory glee by pumping as many perfect reviews from the broken system as possible.
Empire: Total War is another prime example of this kind of inherently-flawed joke of a review process. It’s ridden with flaws, typographic errors, AI glitches, technological crashes, and a complete lack of challenge. An astoundingly unpolished release, clearly rushed, and clearly untested. It deserves maybe a B-, and I’d personally take extra points simply because Creative Assembly (the developer) has had three nearly-identical games with completely-identical-but-somehow-worse-with-every-generation bugs.
Game reviews tend to spike sharply just prior, and directly subsequent to their release - it’s generally a low downward trend from there. Even metacritic gets inundated by the hype - it’s generally best to read the lowest reviews and get a feel for what the real complaints are going to be. Major reviewers are always in the publisher’s pocket.
I certainly do miss the halcyon days of Computer Gaming World, where you were guaranteed that the review would be honest and fair and upfront about flaws and bugs. IIRC they gave it 3/5 stars, but did mention the bad AI in passing, so that’s one review out of 12.
Just really confirming what the others have said, the entire game review industry is corrupt from top to bottom. Having done ad hoc work for a small PC gaming company I know from personal experience, the review a mag will do on your game depends on how many pages of ads you buy.
The game review industry is exactly as corrupt as you want it to be in that it changes from review to review and publication to publication. And some of the biggest offenders can be explained away easily as just straddling that line between geeky fanboys who don’t want to be critical and corrupt journalists who got paid for their review.
While I’ve never had a PR flak come out and ask if they’re getting a good review, I have had them stop responding to emails and requests for games after a poor review or if the review took longer to be published than they think it should have.
And sometimes, the “bought and paid for reviews” are just because the writer is a big fanboy. This is the reason IGN’s reviews are so high. They operate much like the book review industry in that every review should be varying flavors of “It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad… 8.0!” And don’t ever trust a review coming out of Play magazine, their biases are well known and if a game is side-scrolling it instantly earns game of the month honors.
As to the “Kane and Lynch thing”, I was never thoroughly convinced anything hinky went on there. It all seems to stem from the fact that GameSpot has never said “We didn’t fire Gertsmann because Eidos asked us to.” No one will ever know the truth, but GameSpot is obviously guilty in the eyes of most readers just because they accept advertising and run game reviews. It doesn’t matter that until he was fired, Gertsmann would have been considered part of the problem by the readers.
I’ve found it very important to ignore the ‘score’ of video games and read between the lines in the actual review. It’s pretty funny to read a review that slates a game for crashes poor controls poor AI and a few other things and you get to the end and it’s 85% a must buy! Yeah right.
I have a subscription to PC Gamer and one thing I’ve noticed is it no longer mentions game crashes or bugs (unless it’s some shovelware POS). I find this very disturbing as I remember in the past several high profile games where the reviewer mentioned game stopping bugs in it. I can’t tell if it’s just because buggy half finished games are now the standard and aren’t worth mentioning or if the editors just decided to start sweeping them under the rug.
I don’t get the hate for Empire Total War. Aside from my achievements not unlocking when they should and two crashes (not bad for 30+ hours of play) and yeah sure the AI isn’t superbright I haven’t really experienced any bugs. Certainly less then Rome. Heck Shogun for me was a million times worse and I still remember the game fondly.
One of the big gamebreakers I read about wrt ETW is the fact (apparently) that there is something preventing the AI from transferring troops from sea to land. Any of you noticed this (or counterexamples) when playing that game?
From what I can tell, it’s that the AI never transfers troops from land to sea. I never see any fleets floating around with army indicators on them. This certainly detracts from playing the British and a few others, but for any continental power such as Prussia the gameplay ramifications are nearly nil.
:rolleyes: Justin_Bailey, I rarely criticize you, but this is exceedingly off. Gerstman gave an honest review, that wasn’t even that harsh. He simply didn’t cover up some serious, blatant flaws. Gamespot then pulled everything it could do to keep Eidos. I doubt Eidos specifically demanded it, but they definitely didn’t mind it being done for them.
Did you watch the video review? He savaged the game. As a reviewer that’s his call, but the video review does not jive with the written review (that he also wrote).
Finally, you’re not going to get anybody to agree on anything when it comes to games journalism on the net. You can find a bunch of people who will tell you that they agreed with Gerstmann’s firing because they thought he was unprofessional. So it may be “exceedingly off” for you, but it not “exceedingly off” for everyone.
