THIS. SO MUCH THIS. It happens to every single exclusive title. The first impressions are always very positive, even for games that, down the road or even right after people have gotten the game, are looked upon as mediocre by the average gamer. Those people just aren't suited for giving first impressions because they aren't looking at the titles with neutral glasses.
I love GAF, and it's easy to get carried away with excitement. People love to say I'm negative for the sake of being negative, but that's not quite right. I simply enjoy participating in conversations with people who hold different perspectives than I do, because I learn more that way. In topics where I just say I love something and everyone agrees with me, it's not as enjoyable to discuss. I already know I love it and why I love it, and I don't learn much about anything from people who simply share the same views I do.
The point anyway is that because of this, I look for posters who have traditionally never had a problem criticizing products they had a previous investment in. I look for posters who for example were excited for Tomb Raider 2013, expressed hype throughout the year leading up to its release but then when it came out gave hugely detailed impressions explaining why it failed to live up to their expectations. The fact that they paid for the product was besides the point, it failed to be an experience worth it for them. For many people they never can reach that point where they admit that maybe the game they were anticipating is far more disappointing than they ever could have imagined.
The GTAIV thread pisses me off to this day.
Haha. People want to love games they've been anticipating for so long, it's a natural reaction. It's hard to admit all that excitement was for nothing.
Look at Zelda: Twilight Princess. I want to say I love that game, one of my favorite 3D Zeldas. But it's fair to say that Jeff Gerstmann got sooo much shit for giving it an 8.9, and now post release nobody thinks that review was unfair at all. People just couldn't get over this idea they had in their head that Twilight Princess was going to be the sequel MATOOR ZELDA Ocarina of Time that they were missing, and any distance there was between what we got and achieving that goal was considering heretical.
I figure that for The Order, it's the same for at least some portion of those who rushed to get first impressions up. I'm sure many do think it's good, but I think these impressions are necessarily inflated because it's people who wanted to come in and say "see, early negative impressions were bullshit" and now we're faced with the prospect that, no, there was something deeply flawed with the development of this game.