Polygon gives high scores to games despite their anti-consumer aspects / DRM strategy

I made the mistake of getting SimCity yesterday. It isn't a bad game. It is in no way a 9.5 though. The highest I could go would be a 7.5 when everything is functioning. It feels like the series went almost no where in every measurable way and in many instances took steps back. I am already bored with it after barely 24 hours.

-City size is incredibly restrictive.
-Some of the UI is counter intuitive
-You really don't ever get to build that big beautiful city with all the great land marks because there is no room for them unless you want to start bulldozing apartment buildings and reduce your population, which never gets much above 200K even in the most densely packed cities.
-I am constantly dealing with stuff that isn't fun to design. It is just busy work. The whole game feels like homework. It isn't difficult, just annoying.
-Yesterday I had to wait 15 minutes for a server to clear so I could play my private region (which is as close as this game gets singleplayer)

This is the last time I buy a game on Origin. I will get Battlefield 4 on console before I do this again.
 
CrazyDude said:
I understand this, but game sites use to put the words "perfect" under the 10 scores. Today, IGN puts the world "masterpiece" under 10/10 scores, but in the past it was "perfect." Game site realized the mistake of putting perfect under the scores and changed that, but the misconception of that still continues because of that.
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Yeah, I understand that. I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was just adding that, even if a 10 no longer represents "perfection" on these gaming sites, it should still be a score that's given out rarely. Gaming sites give out 10's far more often than they ever did in previous console generations, and those top scores almost always go to big-budget games.
 
Didn't see it posted, but courtesy of John Walker:

polygif.gif
 
eznark said:
Definitely sounds like he is going to schill:
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But why hold off on a review? It only benefits EA and gives them a benefit of the doubt. They publicly released a game and now are not being judged by the initial experience offered to players.
 
Papercuts said:
I'll give you the whole Javik thing being poorly handled, but stuff like preorders are so common that there are so many more games that can be added to having a blind eye turned towards them.

Hell, just looking at your avatar and the last of us preorder bonuses, you get single player skins, bonus cash and xp in multiplayer, which I believe is competitive meaning this stuff is far worse than the ME3 co-op gambling stuff which can be easily ignored. This goes out of its way to give people an edge with the preorder. I hate these practices, but some in parciular can simply not be ignored at this point without having a damn near 100% rate of simply not supporting games anymore and renting everything.
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And this is why i'm a nintendo fan -- their only anti-consumer policy is the game transferring for DD games. And friend codes. Given i buy mostly retail on consoles, and don't play Nintendo games online (they're mostly incompetent at netcode anyway) neither is a huge issue for me.
You can be a gamer without supporting those policies, but basically you have to use GoG, indie games, Nintendo systems, and other "retro-game-sales" services almost exclusively, except for PC games that use Steam or other fair DD services, have reasonable prices, no mandatory online, and no preorder bonuses. Sega and Valve games come to mind.
 
animlboogy said:
I don't think any developer intends to have servers shit the bed when they launch. Then again, it happened with literally every single launch I can think of and EA isn't exactly short on cash for servers. I am ignorant of the details but you would think this kind of problem would be solvable this many years into the emergence of online gaming. You know, with them taking down two year old game servers every other month.
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To me, if EA wants to take these risks by requiring online play for all modes of play, they should suffer a failed risk.
 
animlboogy said:
I don't think any developer intends to have servers shit the bed when they launch. Then again, it happened with literally every single launch I can think of and EA isn't exactly short on cash for servers. I am ignorant of the details but you would think this kind of problem would be solvable this many years into the emergence of online gaming. You know, with them taking down two year old game servers every other month.
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Doesn't work, easy review, and a zero it deserves. I don't get how people can say anything else. These companies want to push this always online BS and then their servers are broken or overloaded, 0/10. Doesn't work. /review.

You know what? Half-Life 2 being one of my favorite games, 0/10... you guys remember 2004 steam right? Hell, even 2005 and a lot of 2006 steam? Even now it is kind of jank for going offline which I do do a bit of.
 
I was completely unaware that the new Sim City had always-online DRM.

LOL screw that. I wanted to play the new installment but not at the cost of supporting this garbage publisher practice.
 
dimb said:
But why hold off on a review? It only benefits EA and gives them a benefit of the doubt. They publicly released a game and now are not being judged by the initial experience offered to players.
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Because he would rather hold off on a review entirely to avoid hitting EA's metacritic score negatively, to avoid burning that bridge.

Always remember, the publishers are your partners, and the reader is the enemy.
 
Patrick Stafford needs to understand that it's not up to the readers to "invest" in raising the bar, it's up to the writers to do some proper journalism. Independently of how "proud" he is of his articles, the bottom line is Polygon is just as bad as Kotaku on several aspects (remember how both of them published the same Halo Pizza Hut PR a couple of months ago?).
On the topic of their bogus "clowtown amateur hour" reviews, If something isn't ready to be published as final, then don't publish it - how hard is it to review games on ideal conditions before release? I would also like to add that its absolute bullshit to go back and forth between review scores and say that they don't fit the website's mould for normal journalistic pieces - it's like throwing sand at the eyes of the readers.
 
Dibbz said:
Where the fuck do you people pull this crap from? It's not a review if their is no opinion? Opinions are what get people in the shit in the first place. Opinions can be bought, they can be swayed. Nostalgia goggles can blind someone from the flaws of a game.

You know what would be handy? A review that said:

"Here are the bugs, Here are some broken mechanics. Here are the good bits. Decide for yourself if this is worth it or not"

Not shit that assumes I have my head shoved up my ass like the writer:
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What you describe is not a review.

Posters here generally have no idea as to what a review should entail. That they oftentimes embrace the idea that a review should be a person telling you he liked or disliked a game as indication of its quality is fairly damning.

Reviews should build an argument for or against a game's quality. In the case of SimCity, Tom Chick does an excellent job of listing the game's design flaws. These exist separate and distinct from Chick's feelings as how much he likes or dislikes the game.
 
Do reviews even matter to gae sales anymore honestly? I feel like in the new socially connected world we live in, word of mouth matters more. For people on gaf we should all know what games we like and dont like. Seeing videos, trailers, gameplay, and playing demos, should give us a good chance to know yes or no on any game before purchasing. If I was running a gamimg website I would scrap reviews and previews completely and move to series of editorials in which each editor picks something they want to write about. Something like what Grantland has done for sports ect, at least the content would be more interesting to read.
 
samman6 said:
Do reviews even matter to gae sales anymore honestly? I feel like in the new socially connected world we live in, word of mouth matters more. For people on gaf we should all know what games we like and dont like. Seeing videos, trailers, gameplay, and playing demos, should give us a good chance to know yes or no on any game before purchasing. If I was running a gamimg website I would scrap reviews and previews completely and move to series of editorials in which each editor picks something they want to write about. Something like what Grantland has done for sports ect, at least the content would be more interesting to read.
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Don't underestimate the power of a 90+ Metacritic score in terms of sales.
 
samman6 said:
Do reviews even matter to gae sales anymore honestly? I feel like in the new socially connected world we live in, word of mouth matters more. For people on gaf we should all know what games we like and dont like. Seeing videos, trailers, gameplay, and playing demos, should give us a good chance to know yes or no on any game before purchasing. If I was running a gamimg website I would scrap reviews and previews completely and move to series of editorials in which each editor picks something they want to write about. Something like what Grantland has done for sports ect, at least the content would be more interesting to read.
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Reviews and word of mouth are the same thing.
 
Rolf NB said:
Reviews and word of mouth are the same thing.
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Reviews usually have a number attached to it and come from a "reputable sorce". What I mean by word of mouth is more my friends in real life or something akin to user reactions on message boards which don't have the need for review deadlines or number scale influences. Which ultimately skews reviews.
Lime said:
Don't underestimate the power of a 90+ Metacritic score in terms of sales.
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Do we have any data really supporting that though, since most high profile multi million sellers are establshed frnchises, they usually get high review scores by default it seems. Haven't you read reviews that basically felt as if the person never played the game threw out some cliches like "visceral action" and gave it a 90 or more just because it is COD or it is GOW, Halo ect... I feel many of the top selling IP's get good meta critic just because thats what they are. We need some data on non hyped ips getting great scores and then selling extremely well because of those scores, I feel the correlation between high scores and sales is less then between marketing and sales. The only one I can think of was bioshock, but it had a large marketing push and strong demo to fuel sales.
 
Anybody implying Tom Chick is waiting to be a shill by not doing a scored review of SimCity clearly hasn't read many Tom Chick reviews. If the guy is a shill for anything, it's for more detailed reasoning and descriptors in game critiques, i.e. less uses of, "I like this game because it is fun," and more, "This game is fun to me because...".
 
SteveWinwood said:
So really polygon is going to go back and re review every game that has ever had problems when they reviewed it right?
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Of course not, that would require actual effort on their part. They wouldn't give a shit about this either, if they hadn't been called out on their review by everyone.
 
Dibbz said:
Where the fuck do you people pull this crap from? It's not a review if their is no opinion? Opinions are what get people in the shit in the first place. Opinions can be bought, they can be swayed. Nostalgia goggles can blind someone from the flaws of a game.

You know what would be handy? A review that said:

"Here are the bugs, Here are some broken mechanics. Here are the good bits. Decide for yourself if this is worth it or not"

Not shit that assumes I have my head shoved up my ass like the writer:
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Uh.


Revven said:
You can have an opinion on the product, but it shouldn't be the entirety of the review. Facts should be present. And if said fact is that a glitch exists or several glitches exist, then the product is objectively flawed and should be graded as such.

Bugs or freezes should not be open to interpretation, they are a negative to the game.
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Of course, but a review containing the written thoughts and opinion of the game (along with saying what's crap, like bugs and poor whatever) is still an opinion.
 
Hey OP, I hope you realize that Mass Effect 3's microtransaction scheme is awesome and not at all anti-consumer. Just because something has DLC doesn't make it bad.


And yes, I like Mass Effect 3. I think it's the best of the trilogy. Come at me, bros.
 
Vire said:
Giant Bomb - 3 Stars
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They'll totally change it down because they are professional like polygon.

The thing of it is, if you can get a group of enthusiastic players together, the kind you know won't do dickish things, like polluting your region to death, or harboring scads of murderers in their dilapidated hellhole of a town, SimCity works. As weird and awkward as it seems at first, the more you play it under ideal conditions, the more clear Maxis' vision for this game becomes. It's almost like a kind of social experiment in cooperation, albeit one that is perhaps a bit too open to exploitation. While you can't just go in and wreck anyone's city wholesale, there are smaller, more insidious things players can do to royally screw up someone's region, and don't think there won't be those people. Of course, you can always set your game to private, making sure that only friends and likeminded individuals can join. But if my experience has been any indication, those safeguards aren't terribly reliable right now. I had one early region set to private, and then after a bit of server wonkiness, it had become infested with unfamiliars.

Granted, that is an issue that may have just been the result of launch jitters on EA's servers, but this brings us to the biggest flaw in SimCity's design. SimCity is an always-online game, meaning if the servers are off, everybody's game is off. EA calls SimCity's multiplayer asynchronous, and that's partially correct. There's nothing that requires players to be on at the same time to play. However, we do all have to be able to connect to EA's servers to play. Yes, even if you just want to noodle around in your own city and don't care an iota what's going on in the larger region today, you can't load up your city data if the servers are down. And the servers have been down. Several times, in fact, since the game launched this past Tuesday. A week from now, these concerns might not even be justified. The servers could be back up and work flawlessly forever a minute after this is published. Regardless, this underlying philosophy, one that dictates that if everyone can't play, then no one shall play, is a troubling one.

It is therefore difficult to completely reconcile a game like SimCity. This is a game with startling clarity of vision, but that vision often feels narrow and intractable. It knows precisely what it wants to be, and in most key ways, executes on those ideas with precision. But in setting that course, it all but dismisses the way in which many played SimCity sequel after sequel. And while I expect many will fall head-over-heels in love with this SimCity's cooperative design, at its best, the game feels more like a really thoughtfully designed multiplayer mode for a larger, single-player capable game that, sadly, doesn't exist. Go in with the right expectations, and there's a good chance you'll enjoy your time with SimCity. Assuming, of course, EA's servers will let you play it in the first place.
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A fun few paragraphs. Alex actually calls the shit out.
 
Festwill said:
Press reset? On review scores?


Some study showed there was a strong correlation, yes. Can't be arsed to google it though.

Edit: there.
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Ill just post the juicy bit here:

Marc Doyle creator of Metacritic from Guardian Article 2008 said:
Have you heard of specific instances where a Metacritic score has affected the sales of a game - for better or worse? Not specifically. Of course friends and users of the site have informed me that they haven't purchased games (or seen movies or bought albums) with low Metascores, but I've never been told by a publisher or developer that they've been able to definitively make a causal connection between poor sales and low scores from my site.
However, at least two major publishers have conducted comprehensive statistical surveys through which they've been able to draw a correlation between high metascores and stronger sales (and vice versa), but with a much tighter correlation in specific genres of games than in others.
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There is no actual numbers here just a reference to a WSJ article from 2007 that mentions a study done by Activision. Yes I clicked on that link too, no real numbers there either. It would be nice to see the actual study. Even doing do a statistical analysis that takes gamescores vs sales isn't enough since many of the highest rated games also have the most marketing muscle behind them and they are usually in established IP's. It would be extremely hard to get a real correlation factor between score and sales only. Don't get me wrong there is something there but the correlation I would argue is way less then marketing for the product. Honestly there are a lot of factors on why games sell or they don't I just happen to think reviews are a minor factor.
 
Arthur Gies' twitter feed is hilarious at the moment. Frantically answering people's questions as what does and does not merit a review update.

Will DLC affect a score? 'Dunno yet'
Will someone monitor MMO's for score changes? 'No'
Patches? 'Yes'
Diablo 3? 'Before site launch'

If a system reviews so many caveats, reservations and unknowns, chances are you didn't think it completely though to begin with.

The question I look forward to them answering? What about non-AAA games? Several indie games have changed dramatically but the scores haven't been touched. Are updates only for large publishers with aggressive PR departments?
 
samman6 said:
Do we have any data really supporting that though, since most high profile multi million sellers are establshed frnchises, they usually get high review scores by default it seems. Haven't you read reviews that basically felt as if the person never played the game threw out some cliches like "visceral action" and gave it a 90 or more just because it is COD or it is GOW, Halo ect... I feel many of the top selling IP's get good meta critic just because thats what they are. We need some data on non hyped ips getting great scores and then selling extremely well because of those scores, I feel the correlation between high scores and sales is less then between marketing and sales. The only one I can think of was bioshock, but it had a large marketing push and strong demo to fuel sales.
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Don't worry, I agree with you by and large. I was mostly just pointing out that because the general consumer is risk-averse in spending $60 at launch on a game, they consult Metacritic to see if the game is worth the large amount of money for entertainment.
 
I think a question that needs to be asked is:
Is it a reviewer's responsibility to act as an advocate for a player?
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Personally I don't think so. Day 1 DLC and always on DRM are things which are removed from the core game experience, so I don't think they should be factored into the score. Don't get me wrong though, I do feel like these things should be mentioned as the first job of a review is to inform the consumer, but where does one draw the line?

Polygon changed Sim City's score based on constant server issues which rendered the game unplayable, but which issues are large enough or malevolent enough to warrant a change to the review?

EDIT:

Look at Life of Pi. Reviews and awards say this is an excellent movie, but when you look at the controversy surrounding it you realize the company that made it is terrible for denying proper payment and credit for the VFX artists. Does that make Life of Pi worse? No. Does it make the company that MADE Life of Pi worse? Yes.
 
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