Why User Reviews Are Necessary

The other day I read an interesting column about how user reviews on sites such as Amazon or Metacritic are bullshit, because lots of people tend to vote only the maximum or minimum amount of points (or stars) and because Metacritic doesn't even require you to own the game you're rating and because certain publishers and game developers have been caught rating their own shit. And maybe average Joe simply isn't as "qualified" to review games as us professional games critics. To which I say - get off your high horse. User reviews are as important (and full of shit) as most "professional" ones.

Let's get one thing out of the way: Video game critics and wine experts have one thing in common. The better ones among us are great with words, but aside from that, we're faking it, because we're just as stupid as everybody else. You don't need any special skills to tell whether or not you like or dislike a game and tell people why you do or do not enjoy playing something. This isn't fucking rocket science. It's goddamn entertainment. Anyone capable of forming an opinion and explaining it with a few words can be a games critic. Maybe not a great one at that, but the lousy quality of today's gaming magazines and websites is an entirely different matter.

So user reviews are bad, apparently. Current popular example: The PC version of Fallout 4 scored an 85 with professional reviewers, while the user rating sits at an underwhelming 5.4 on Metacritic. And while the average user score is certainly off the mark with this one, you can't deny that many of them raise valid points of criticism, from the horrid console UI to the usual plethora of Bethesda bugs, tons upon tons of boring fetch quests or the fact that the story pretty much forces you to be a goodie-goodie, where games like New Vegas allowed you to become a slaver, if you so desired. And while I'm personally enjoying the streamlined new perk system and the absence of durability loss on anything but power armor, you can't deny that this is the easiest Fallout game of all times. A five year old could master this game on the default difficulty setting. That whole "wasteland survival" feeling gets a little ruined when you can get all sorts of perks that make you immune to radiation during the first five or so level ups.

I don't agree with a 5.4. I like Fallout 4. But you can't just claim that all of these user reviews are completely pointless and contain no valid criticism. Many of the things users bring up on Metacritic or Steam aren't mentioned in any professional reviews and, as a user, I find them interesting and relevant. And there are lots of games, where the user rating is simply more accurate than the professional average.

This still image is only slightly slower than the actual gameplay.

Take the abysmal Need for Speed: Rivals, for instance. A professional metascore of 76 for the worst game in the series by far. The PC version of this game is frame-capped at 30 FPS. A fucking racing game, which came out in late 2013 with a 30 FPS frame cap! If you unlocked the cap, it would break the game's physics, cars would start flying away and everything ran way too fast. The game also introduced great features such as unskippable tutorial videos on how to accelerate and use your brakes. Because clearly we've never played a racing title before. The tutorial is played twice for good measure. Look, if you wanna see for yourself how fucking awful and broken this game is, look at TotalBiscuit's Let's Not Play. I have bought this game after reading some of the positive professional reviews, none of which mentioned those annoying tutorials, the shitty frame cap or the problem with the physics engine, let alone the piss-poor performance of the Frostbite engine, which struggles to maintain Rivals' ridiculous 30 FPS in the first place. The low user-rating of 3.2 is spot on and I would have saved a lot of money if I had checked metacritic before I bought this thing.

Another great example for a series of games, most professional reviewers don't know anything about is Call of Duty. Year after year they fart out another spectacular 4 hour campaign with lots of flashy explosions. Granted, Black Ops 3 actually offers a few more hours of gameplay, but it's still on rails, you still can't leave your predetermined path and, most importantly, a huge part of the player base never touches the fucking campaign! I haven't finished the story in any CoD title since Modern Warfare 3, because - like a large part of the community - I focus solely on the multiplayer portion of the series. And guess what? Professional reviewers don't get to fucking see the multiplayer, because they get to play a press version, weeks ahead of the official release.

Yes, they get to play against other reviewers and random Youtubers, but how's the matchmaking? Are cheaters ruining every lobby? Are there dedicated servers? Are any of the new game modes "professionals" praise in their shitty reviews actually being played or do people ignore them anyway, because everyone only plays TDM and Domination? If you want to know about any of these things, you depend on user reviews, because professional reviewers are too busy talking about the campaign or the 3 new multiplayer modes nobody is going to play.

War never changes :P

But what really ticks me off is when a professional critic complains about user reviews being bought. Excuse me? I remember when I was asked to review the hilariously awful Silent Hunter Online. You probably haven't heard about that game, because who the hell gives a fuck about browser-based Free2Play submarine simulators? If you watch only a single video today, make sure it's the following trailer:

I was asked to change my negative review into a neutral preview, because Ubisoft paid for the article. Sponsored content. It's a fucking advertisiement, pretending to be a real article. Yes, you spend a lot of money on a magazine to read fucking sponsored content.

Oh and do you remember Final Fantasy XIV? The first version, before the re-release, which now rivals WoW's subscription numbers? The original Final Fantasy XIV was so bad, Square fired the entire team that worked on it and started from scratch.

The original release was a broken, unplayable mess, where your biggest problem was a pair of broken panties. I'm not making this up. Apart from the usual weapons and armor your average Eorzean adventurer would carry around, every character also had a pair of underpants, which would take damage in combat like every other piece of equipment. And this would eventually result in a little warning icon on your screen, informing you about item damage. Problem is, if you didn't level up the crafting profession required to repair your own knickers, you'd be stuck with the item damage icon for all eternity, because you could not take your broken underwear to a repair NPC or another player. You could do so with any other item, but removing your undies was not allowed, so they'd remain broken for good.

I was asked to review the game for a magazine and they bumped up my intended rating by about 10 points, because, "Square are too important, we can't afford to piss them off." Yes. This is a thing. So excuse me, if I can't help but laugh when a professional reviewer complains about certain user reviews being "bought". So what if there are one or two phony user ratings among hundreds of legit ones on Steam, Amazon or Metacritic?
They made me hand out a rating of 73 for the original Final Fantasy XIV, a game so unfinished, so unplayable, it was little more than a concept demo. If you wanted to know how awful this game was back then, user reviews were a lot more trustworthy than certain professional outlets.

Don't get me wrong. This doesn't happen all the time. I've only experienced this with four or five of my articles with a place I've long severed my ties with. But it absolutely happens. There's a reason many readers are having a hard time trusting professional reviewers these days. There's a reason certain magazines spend more time explaining and justifying their review scores than they do talking about fucking games. Of course you have to take user reviews into consideration before you buy something! Fuck the numbers, ignore the fact that many of them rate in nothing but absolutes and always go for a straight 0 or 10 and nothing in between. But read their reasons. Figure out why they love or hate a game.

I always wanted to be a games critic. I read all the gaming magazines I could get when I was ten years old. And when some of you flew cardboard boxes to the moon or dressed up like cowboys I'd sit and write my own reviews about my favourite C64 games, just for myself. To me, this is the coolest job in the world. Some of the folks I get to work with nowadays were true childhood heroes to me. But for fuck's sake. Stop being so goddamn arrogant. You write about fucking videogames. You're hardly brain surgeons.

-Cat

EQ2: Terrors of Thalumbra is the best, worst expansion, ever

When SOE Daybreak announyed that there'd be no more expansions for Everquest 2, lots of people feared it would go the way of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and Free Realms. But as people were starting to look for new virtual homes one one of the many other MMORPGs out there, Daybreak suddenly made a surprise announcement - there would be another expansion after all: Terrors of Thalumbra.

Sounded too good to be true, which is exactly what it was. With price tags ranging from 35 Dollars (standard edition) all the way up to 140 Dollars (premium edition), you'd expect a pretty juicy content infusion. Instead, you get a new signature questine, which can be completed in about three hours, a ton of generic side quests (kill this, loot that), new "prestige" items, which can only be equipped while you have a running subscription and an ugly brown zone with a dull and generic storyline, full of dull and generic characters. Look, you've already sent me to the afterlife and dragon heaven, had me join the armies of good and evil in an attempt to save the world in a massive showdown, so throwing me into some generic steampunk cave full of gnomes... sorry, "gnemlins", isn't gonna get me super hyped.

There is nothing epic about Terrors of Thalumbra and compared to some of the most exciting things you could see and do in previous expansions, Thalumbra looks and feels like early mid-level content at best. And this is the new "end game". It offers more or less the same amount of stuff you'd get in a free content update from more popular, successful MMOs, but with maximum padding. Here's a city, but you cannot interact with any of the NPCs without grinding a ton of reputation. Here's an instanced dungeon, which uses the exact same map as the city, except all the NPCs were replaced by monsters. Here's another dungeon, which uses the fucking city map AGAIN!

What's worse, the game no longer explains shit. Previous expansions finally gave you map markers and a general idea where you should go. They removed that sort of thing from Thalumbra, because apparently it adds to the "immersion". I have spent an hour down in a seemingly cleared dungeon, only to find some tiny, random bowl of water sitting in the corner of a room. You can pick it up, but you cannot use it, the item description tells you nothing about it. Turns out you have to bring the bowl to a dog at the other end of the dungeon to stop him from kicking you out of an elevator. Meanwhile, the quest log states: "Observe the activity of [generic bad guy faction]."

Look, I don't need a game to hold my hand every step of the fucking way. But this shit is just lazy. Speaking of lazy - EQ2 lets you study the anatomy of certain enemies (e.g. orcs, gnolls and the like), so you could use a powerful master strike against them. Studying them also rewards you with a book and a decorative item for your house. The new expansion gets rid of that by introducing trinkets, which allow you to use the master strike against everything. Not only does that make 100 levels of anatomy research entirely worthless, but it also means they won't have to add any more of those quests in the future. Lazy bastards!

The expansion introduced one redeeming new feature, however, which makes all of the laziness and the ridiculous price tag a little more forgivable: The infusion system. Infusable items can be upgraded to absolutely ridiculous power levels, meaning raiders and casual players are now on an equal power level. And this is something many other MMOs should do. Reserving the coolest, strongest, most interesting items for the low percentage of players, who have the time and the willpower to treat an online game like a second job is stupid. This shit needs to stop. A raid is its own reward.

The way EQ2 works right now is brilliant. You can play solo or group dungeons, join a raid, temporarily lower your level to enjoy some old content you may have skipped before, do whatever you want to do and keep getting stronger while you're at it. You'll earn enough ingame currency and resources to keep upgrading your stuff for a while. The system doesn't come without its flaws, however. The fastest way to upgrade stuff via infusion is by spending ingame currency. And you can make a ton of currency simply by buying subscription tokens for real money and selling them on the broker (read: auction house). You can turn real money into stats for your character.

It would make a lot more sense to award infusion points for simply playing the game, completing dungeons and quests, taking part in events and activities, rather than allowing players to throw money at the screen to make their characters grow in strength. But at the end of the day, this is Everquest 2 we're talking about, they're desperate for money and they'll do whatever it takes to seperate you from your cash. To be fair, infusable gear is incredibly powerful even without sinking mountains of currency into them and the first bunch of infusions is affordable with whatever gold you'll take home from your daily dungeons. But the wealthiest players will always be the most powerful ones. I'm not sure if this is any better than dividing the community into raiders and filthy casuals.

-Cat

God Damn It, Nintendo!

The biggest drawback to my job isn't the relatively crappy pay or the sometimes ridiculous and inhumane deadlines for articles. To me, it's non-disclosure agreements. I've been playing Fallout 4 for roughly two weeks before its official release, which was fucking awesome. Despite a bunch of people meta-bombing the shit out of it in the user ratings right now, it's one of the best games I've played all year. And I couldn't tell anyone about it. In fact, when my friends got hyped about it on Facebook and started posting trailers, teasers and other such things to show their anticipation, I decided to post a picture of my original box of Fallout Tactics, which resulted in instant complaints - dude, don't talk about anything even remotely related to Fallout! I didn't post anything directly related to Fallout 4, I sure as fuck didn't reveal any story, artwork, ingame-footage or breach my NDA in any other way. But posting stuff that could be remotely connected in some way to an unreleased AAA-title gets you in trouble.

The spiders in my toilet are a close second.

Meanwhile, certain outlets have posted tons of "leaked" footage and some stores started selling the PS4 version several days before the official release, so that whole thing didn't really work out as planned, anyway.
Being able to play stuff before anyone else is awesome, of course. But NDAs are pure torture. Imagine you had a chance to start playing a game you've been looking forward to all year long, before anybody else you knew, and you couldn't tell anybody. It also means that, while most people are only starting to get to the best parts of the game right now, I've already seen all the endings, dicked around with all the factions and I've seen and done most of the stuff there is to see and do. And fuck all the whiners, I think this game is incredible! I've sawed a man into tiny pieces and then put his remains on a shelf!

German neatness, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Of course they're not just letting me play games early simply because I'm so awesome and I'm better at this stuff than all you ignorant cunts. It's work. I get shit done on there and then write about it. And then I get paid. Because it turns out my parents lied to me and you don't actually need to finish school and yes, you can just sit on your ass and play games all day and go through life just fine. Give it a try!

Long story short, I've got a lot of paid work to do, most of it is already done and Christmas is actually happening this year. As in, we don't just write our names on a bunch of cards and pretend that we contributed to everyone's presents whilst stuffing our faces with free food - Claire and I are actually spending a little something on some fun new toys.

Close, but no.

Here's the thing - we both spend a significant amount of time playing video games together when we're at home. But sometimes we have to leave the house and that's where we depend on mobile gaming devices. And ours are old. We've got everything from a classic Gameboy to a Sony PSP, but time has moved on, we've got a bit of spare money, so why not upgrade to something a little less dated?

My first impulse was to jump at the 2DS + Mario Kart 7 package for 75 Quid. Holy fuck. That's a fantastic game with a decent enough handheld console right there. At an insanely cheap price. But then we had a look at the 3DS XL, which has an extra analog nub, more power, it's bigger, faster, better at all the things an suddenly we're looking at nearly 150 Quid per console. And at that price you may as well go for the much more powerful Playstation Vita.

Because who needs games when you have Skype?

Higher resolution, a slightly bigger screen, a freaking quadcore cpu and so much more power in that baby than in a 3DS XL. Heck, some PS Vita games look so amazing, this thing almost feels like a portable Playstation 3.
And while lots of people argue that "graphics aren't important", I fucking love quality visuals in a game and yes, to me, they are very important and can make a good game even better. Besides, half of those fucks, who are whining about Fallout 4 over at Metacritic complain about the game's dated visuals, so graphics can't be that irrelevant after all.

Here's the thing, though. I've looked at the features, capabilities and the best games currently available for 3DS and PS Vita. And I've come to the following conclusion: If you enjoy fun, colourful games with lots of customization and great multiplayer, get a 3DS. If you want to watch movies, play music, browse the internet or talk to your friends on the go, get a fucking smartphone.

There are some cool-looking first person shooters available for the Vita (like, two of them). I won't lie - being able to play an FPS title with stunning visuals on the go is super tempting. But it's not "spend 250 Quid on a techno-doorstopper" kind of tempting. I'd play those shooters, finish them a few hours later, maybe even get some fun out of local multiplayer with Claire and that about wraps it up. On the 3DS I'd get Fire Emblem (with another, even cooler new Fire Emblem on the horizon), Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Star Fox... heck, for as much as I hate how stupidly overrated Ocarina of Time is (Twilight Princess was superior in just about every way), the 3DS version looks so great, I'd probably give that a go. I can look at the best current and upcoming 3DS titles and spot a dozen or more titles I'd play right the fuck now. Then I look at the list for the PS Vita, spot 4 or 5 games with absolutely amazing visuals, two of which I'd probably play, and the rest is boring, pixellated indie crap you can also get on Steam for a few pennies.

I grew up in a Segan household. I think Zelda is stupid, I don't give a crap about Mario unless there's kart racing or smashing involved and if you're male, straight, older than 14 and into Pokémon, then all Eagles of Death Metal concerts in Paris should be mandatory for you. There's nothing more annyoing than a bunch of dickbags bitching about EA, Activision and Ubisoft, whilst buying the exact same Nintendo games every year since the early 1980s. It's absolutely pathetic how WiiU games look worse than early Xbox 360 and PS3 titles. And you know what? None of that fucking matters. They still got my money. Sure, I'll spend most of my time playing shitty Atlus RPGs on my 3DS XL when it gets here, but this year, ugly, outdated, stupid Nintendo games beat Sony's handheld console by miles in this house. So there's that.

-Cat

WoW Legion - Make It Singleplayer

I've quit playing WoW back in Cataclysm and I've never looked back. Then Claire mentioned something weird today, saying something like, "I think they're trying to make WoW a little more like Diablo." Apparently, there will be random group dungeons with random powerful drops as an alternative to raids or something. A little bit like rifts in Diablo. I'm paraphrasing here and I haven't actually looked into this feature, because fuck WoW and fuck more group content. But tell you what - if WoW really were to become more like Diablo and I could actually solo randomized content for increasingly powerful gear like in a Diablo-style rift, I'd play the shit out of it. I'd not just resub - I'd pay twice the subscription fee if I had to.

Now, if you're about to ask me why I would even want solo content on an MMORPG - GO FUCK YOURSELF WITH A RAKE! When you're done with that, go do some research on the massive new story expansion for SWTOR. And the reviews for that shit. The whole thing is completely solo, people are coming back like crazy to play it and everybody fucking loves it. Yes, they're subscribing to an MMORPG to fucking solo, so quit telling me that solo content is unimportant to the genre, you fucks!

I, like a ton of other (former) WoW players, joined the whole thing on launch day, over a decade ago. I've seen my fair share of raids, heroic dungeons, guild drama, you name it. And, also like pretty much everybody who started back then, I'm done with that sort of thing, but I'm not done with games. What used to be school is now a job and a family. I can't get up in the middle of the night to replace the raid tank who couldn't make it. I don't want WoW or any other game to be my second job. And maybe reading a bunch of crap about Chuck Norris or people putting the word "anal" in front of random ability names in trade channel isn't as funny to me now as it was when that shit was still new. And yes, maybe I'm a bit tired of all the best content, the happy endings and the most amazing items being offered exclusively to those five per cent or so self-congratulatory fucks, who jerk each other off over mythical boss kills and world firsts and shit they've achieved, because they're willing to give up on a huge portion of their real lives to fine-tune their shit and study youtube bosskill videos and shit.

Why not have soloable dungeons with powerful, Diablo-style item drops? That shit can be challenging, I don't mind at all. But why is being a single player so completely fucking worthless? Why can you only get the good shit if you bring 24 friends for everything? Why doesn't individual skill matter at all? Oh yay, I can level up solo, dick around in a garrison or play fucking Pokémon, isn't that great? Let me play a dungeon solo or with just one or two friends and change difficulty and droprate dynamically, like on Diablo, but allow me to get my gear that way, without forcing me into guilds, LFR, group finder, shit with random people. Nobody wants to suffer bots and AFKers in battlegrounds and people only put up with that shit, because they want the gear. Why do you think the cunts at Honorbuddy sell their stupid bot like crazy in the first place? Because people hate to grind for their shit, they hate to play with random people against their will, so they're actually paying real money to have a program do it for them.

WoW subscriptions are at a new low of, I dunno, 5.5 million players or so? That's still a great number, but Blizzard recently announced they'd no longer inform the public about player count. Yeah, that's a big fucking sign of confidence right there. So why not go all the way with the whole Diablo thing? Blizzard are already going out of their way to appeal to the most casual gamers on the planet. I have friends playing WoW, who are so bad at video games, you could put a guy with no arms or legs in a wheelchair in front of a computer, have them try to control the game with their minds and they'd instantly be more successful than my friends. Yet they don't ever stop playing WoW, because it has fucking pandas and pet battles and fool-proof skill trees and gear that changes its stats for you, so you don't have to think. Why not take it one step further and finally stop forcing people to fucking group up?

Okay, sure, it's an MMO, so why would I even want to be able to solo shit? Because sometimes I just want to be successful on my own. Because I don't want to constantly depend on others with every tiny thing that matters on there. Because I'd still have the choice. I can run into friends and team up with them naturally, without a multiplayer staging lobby, if I wanted to. I could still see other players, look at their gear and achievements, I'd still have a living, breathing virtual world. Doesn't mean I wanna depend on all of those fuckers 24/7. I'm surrounded by people in real life, doesn't mean I wanna make friends with all of them and group up when I go to work or shop for groceries. I don't need somebody to hold my hand when I take shit. Allow me to take a shit on my own, Blizzard.

Give people their stupid world first achievments, titles and mounts for raids. Give em exclusive cosmetic gear. You know what game does that? Warframe. Warframe has raid versions of bosses, which rewards players with some cosmetic goodies you can't get any other way. But you can fight easier versions of these bosses alone or with up to three friends. You don't miss out on any super powerful stuff if you don't want to raid. Nobody gets excluded. You can become just as powerful as a solo player as you could be as part of a huge, successful raid guild. It's harder that way - and it should be - but it's entirely possible. You don't get the nice titles, cosmetic doodads and trophies that the big guilds get, but you get the same story, cutscenes, items, everything. You're not getting treated like a second class player.

I know SWTOR isn't entirely like that, but it doesn't have to be. I'm gonna resub to SWTOR, I'll play their story expansion and then I'll take a break until more solo story stuff gets released, because I don't wanna grind dungeon tokens on there. But they're gonna get my money, because they cater to me as a solo player. Perhaps it's time for Blizzard to give that a try? Even if it means pissing off the raid community? Fuck those guys. They never were the biggest part of your player base, so perhaps it's time to stop sucking their dicks.

-Cat