Guild Wars 2

Right now, Metacritic shows 28 reviews for Guild Wars, with the very positive aggregated score of 92 out of 100. All but one review give the game a score of 9 or higher, and the lowest score is still a positive 8.5.

This isn’t a sign of quality, of course – the best sign of quality is playing the game so you can see it by yourself. It is, however, a great achievement for ArenaNet – to see how critics were uniformly happy with the game.

Not that I don’t like Guild Wars 2 (I really do), but don’t put a lot of stock in critics. There is a well-known downhill score trend, because some reviewers are basically bribed for good scores. As well, reviewers who promise to give a game good reviews are allowed access to the game early, meaning the review will be up on launch day (which earns the review website more revenue). Since the current metacritic score is 92, I imagine it will end up at around 88 by the time everyone finishes reviewing it.

Critics lol. Remember their reviews for D3 versus opinion of players?

Yep Rzep, which is why I pay more attention to the user score (though that too can be purposefully swayed by developers, employes and hired firms). For example, Mass Effect 3 is one of the highest rated games in metacritic history, but the user score is below 5 (which I VERY much agree with). GW2’s user score is one of the highest on the site. There are a fair number of negative ones but they are vastly outweighed by the positive reviews.

Rzep.4592:

Critics lol. Remember their reviews for D3 versus opinion of players?

D3 is a great game. Users give a lot of zeros just because the launch issues. That’s stupid, and unffair.

The user score of Metacritic , it’s the worst source of good reviews. The worst.

marianitten.1247:

Auction House Tycoon 3 is an average game. Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game / launch issues.

The user score of Metacritic , it’s the worst source of good reviews. The worst.

Here, I fixed it for you.

Guild Wars 1

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

marianitten.1247:

Auction House Tycoon 3 is an average game. Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game / launch issues.

The user score of Metacritic , it’s the worst source of good reviews. The worst.

Here, I fixed it for you.

average game? Best dungeon crawler today…
Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game.. give me an example please. Diablo 3 is Diablo 2 with today technology. What did you expect? Call Of Duty 5?

marianitten.1247:

average game? Best dungeon crawler today…
Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game.. give me an example please. Diablo 3 is Diablo 2 with today technology. What did you expect? Call Of Duty 5?

Are you kidding me? I have no idea how anyone can say this with a straight face or not be some paid corporate shill posting PR non-sense.

Diablo 3 is NOTHING like Diablo 2. Diablo 2 was the superior game with the sole exception to graphics. Diablo 3 had so many missing features from the previous games that it shames the series to even be called Diablo 3. No randomized maps, itemization prefixes and suffixes are terrible, the crafting system was a joke, uniques are worse than even some standard blue drops, and to make matters worse they gutted the Horadric cube and enchanter from the game during beta (totally willing to bet money they bring em both back in an expansion as a “new feature”). The game had zero replay value when compared to its predecessors.

All of this is pales in comparison to what J. Wilson did to Deckard Cain though. It wasn’t the fact that he killed off one of the games most iconic figures. Bad things happen to good people all the time and even frail old men are not spared the demons wrath, but to kill him off so unceremoniously like that without an epic cinematic to herald the event is an insult. Instead we get some dumb “dream vision” thing where Leah falls asleep and dreams about Azmodan invading a fortress. I don’t even… How they handled Deckard Cain’s death was just bad. It was literally, “Oh no its Magdah! BLARG, I’m dead! Oh wait, here let me fix this sword real quick. Ok, now I’m dead for real this time.” The writing and the voice acting were just terrible. God, the voice acting especially was NOT up to par for such a high budget production. They had no excuse for that failing.

The lack of an offline mode, coupled with the obvious herding of players to the AH, also shows their true motivations.

marianitten.1247:

Rzep.4592:

Critics lol. Remember their reviews for D3 versus opinion of players?

D3 is a great game. Users give a lot of zeros just because the launch issues. That’s stupid, and unffair.

The user score of Metacritic , it’s the worst source of good reviews. The worst.

I played demo actually. Took me 3 aproaches to finaly force myself to get to the first boss that is how bored I was. I actually agree with their score.
I consider d2 to be 10/10 for comparison.

Oh and about todays technology. The graphic engine looks outdated there by about a decade. At the same time my friend using dualcore + integrated graphics had serious slowdowns even on low.

Look at critic Vs player score for SW:TOR on metacritic (85 Vs 5.7) . Also do the same for The Secret World (73 Vs 8.3) GW2 stands at 8.4 for players, only just above TSW .

You have to experience a game for yourself, you simply can not go by a review to know if YOU would like it or not. A review is simply the view of the reviewer and their take on it.

marianitten.1247:

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

marianitten.1247:

Auction House Tycoon 3 is an average game. Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game / launch issues.

The user score of Metacritic , it’s the worst source of good reviews. The worst.

Here, I fixed it for you.

average game? Best dungeon crawler today…
Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game.. give me an example please. Diablo 3 is Diablo 2 with today technology. What did you expect? Call Of Duty 5?

Average game – yes and he was being modest calling it average.
Best dungeon crawler – yes, if you are a bot that enjoys running A3 zillion times and more.
Users are being lied to about what – EVERYTHING, if you need to argue about this point you are just making yourself obvious.
Diablo 3 is Diablo 2 with today technology – that is a flat out lie, if D3 was D2 with updated tech there would be 50% less players on GW2 today.

tl;dr Jay Wilson is that you?

Kravick.4906:

marianitten.1247:

average game? Best dungeon crawler today…
Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game.. give me an example please. Diablo 3 is Diablo 2 with today technology. What did you expect? Call Of Duty 5?

Are you kidding me? I have no idea how anyone can say this with a straight face or not be some paid corporate shill posting PR non-sense.

Diablo 3 is NOTHING like Diablo 2. Diablo 2 was the superior game with the sole exception to graphics. Diablo 3 had so many missing features from the previous games that it shames the series to even be called Diablo 3. No randomized maps, itemization prefixes and suffixes are terrible, the crafting system was a joke, uniques are worse than even some standard blue drops, and to make matters worse they gutted the Horadric cube and enchanter from the game during beta (totally willing to bet money they bring em both back in an expansion as a “new feature”). The game had zero replay value when compared to its predecessors.

All of this is pales in comparison to what J. Wilson did to Deckard Cain though. It wasn’t the fact that he killed off one of the games most iconic figures. Bad things happen to good people all the time and even frail old men are not spared the demons wrath, but to kill him off so unceremoniously like that without an epic cinematic to herald the event is an insult. Instead we get some dumb “dream vision” thing where Leah falls asleep and dreams about Azmodan invading a fortress. I don’t even… How they handled Deckard Cain’s death was just bad. It was literally, “Oh no its Magdah! BLARG, I’m dead! Oh wait, here let me fix this sword real quick. Ok, now I’m dead for real this time.” The writing and the voice acting were just terrible. God, the voice acting especially was NOT up to par for such a high budget production. They had no excuse for that failing.

The lack of an offline mode, coupled with the obvious herding of players to the AH, also shows their true motivations.

And this, my friends, is what nostalgia does to people

Even more importantly than critics’ ratings, the user score is as of right now the highest among the pc game ranking, just 0.1 above the Secret World (8.3). That 8.4 of GW2 is by metacritic’s standards considered a very big success for a game, if we take into account the sheer amount of users who put their own ratings. (420 are positive, 32 in-between and 89 have negative reviews).

OF COURSE, on the other hand, user reviews tend to be 10s and 0s, by fans and haters respectively. That is not the rule however, but usually 10s are in essence 9s and 0s are 4-5s so individually, each review’s integrity and subjectivity is questioned.

Still, the game has enjoyed a very positive reaction by critics and users alike, and that is not something every new game can boast!

Metacritic is flawed – this is well known however I am not saying GW2 is not an excellent game, it is.

Metacritic is actually a good place to start looking for info about a game however many people use it the wrong way because they concentrate too much on numbers and ratings and way less on actual information that can be read in the reviews.

My advice for Metacritic – read the reviews written by game reviewing web sites first because no matter how biased you may think they are they are still made by professionals. After that read the user reviews because you are more likely to find something useful you might have wanted to know about the game in there. Whatever you do don’t bother with ratings just pure info extracted from reviews itself.

Sandrunner.2853:

And this, my friends, is what nostalgia does to people

No, not even. I was playing Diablo 2 right before the Diablo 3 launch. This definitely isn’t a case of fondly remembering an old game. I was playing Diablo 2 very recently. Like I said, with the exception of graphics, Diablo 2 is the better game.

Astaldo.3081:

marianitten.1247:

Diablo 3 is Diablo 2 with today technology. What did you expect? Call Of Duty 5?

Obviously a Troll

Obvious is obvious

Diva.4706:

Look at critic Vs player score for SW:TOR on metacritic (85 Vs 5.7) . Also do the same for The Secret World (73 Vs 8.3) GW2 stands at 8.4 for players, only just above TSW .

You have to experience a game for yourself, you simply can not go by a review to know if YOU would like it or not. A review is simply the view of the reviewer and their take on it.

You can’t really trust the user ratings because, let’s face it, the majority of people on the internet are are complete imbeciles. For the entire launch period of SWToR, metacritic was filled with scores of zero from users just because they were waiting in a queue to get in to play.

The actual critics may be somewhat biased, but that’s to be expected. Not everyone will agree with everyone. It doesn’t mean that they’re being bribed to review it positively, it just means their opinion differs from your own.

The user reviews on metacritic are actually more accurate than you may believe.

They are not there to provide in depth reporting on each and every thing they love or hate but rather to give the general public an idea of current opinion.

It works flawlessy for that very reason. A “0” or “10” score is perfectly acceptable if you understand the the underlying motivation. I like it or I dont like it. Makes no difference what number you put down as a rating as it still serves as a scale for what is liked or not.

Looking at individual scores and comments is not the way it is intended to work, but with thousands it paints a good picture.

Deacon.6249:

The user reviews on metacritic are actually more accurate than you may believe.

They are not there to provide in depth reporting on each and every thing they love or hate but rather to give the general public an idea of current opinion.

It works flawlessy for that very reason. A “0” or “10” score is perfectly acceptable if you understand the the underlying motivation. I like it or I dont like it. Makes no difference what number you put down as a rating as it still serves as a scale for what is liked or not.

Looking at individual scores and comments is not the way it is intended to work, but with thousands it paints a good picture.

I guess. The inherent problem is that the majority of people who go to those types of sites are there to gripe because they don’t like it, while most people that enjoy the game are actually playing it. It’s not a great sample to begin with to draw conclusions from.

When I see that SWTOR is rated in the 5’s while the professionals review it in the upper 8’s, that just tells me that most people are morons, not that the game is actually that bad. I don’t buy into this conspiracy theory crap that professional reviewers are paid off to review games positively. Maybe if their opinions differed significantly from my own that would be one thing, but I almost always agree with their scores.

On the flip side, GW2 is critically acclaimed AND the user review is pretty high as well, which tells me that it must be good if the cesspool that is the internet can rate the game that high.

It’s really hard for me to believe that people here put more stock in the random ramblings of internet fanbois and haters that tend to give a game a 0 just because they couldn’t log on one time, or a 10 because they played the game for 5 minutes and liked it, than they put in professional reviewers.

I mean, even if you disagree with the professional reviews, their reviews almost always have more substance than most of the user reviews. No professional reviewer is going to give a game a 0 because “fanbois of that game put down my favorite game!” But a user sure would.

Creslin.1758:

I mean, even if you disagree with the professional reviews, their reviews almost always have more substance than most of the user reviews. No professional reviewer is going to give a game a 0 because “fanbois of that game put down my favorite game!” But a user sure would.

Feel free to call me cynical, but these types of things are well known in the game industry, and it does have an effect on review scores. Simply look at Metacritic’s top scores list. Triple A games from big publishers usually score much higher with critics than with with players. I’m not saying all or even most professional reviewers pan to publishers, but it is almost unquestionable that some do.

Admittedly, many of the fans who vote are not being fair. But the idea with fan reviews is to average them together (which Metacritic already does) and read through a page or two of them. If that isn’t enough, look up a Let’s Play on Youtube.

Ganpot.3879:

Creslin.1758:

I mean, even if you disagree with the professional reviews, their reviews almost always have more substance than most of the user reviews. No professional reviewer is going to give a game a 0 because “fanbois of that game put down my favorite game!” But a user sure would.

Feel free to call me cynical, but these types of things are well known in the game industry, and it does have an effect on review scores. Simply look at Metacritic’s top scores list. Triple A games from big publishers usually score much higher with critics than with with players. I’m not saying all or even most professional reviewers pan to publishers, but it is almost unquestionable that some do.

Admittedly, many of the fans who vote are not being fair. But the idea with fan reviews is to average them together (which Metacritic already does) and read through a page or two of them. If that isn’t enough, look up a Let’s Play on Youtube.

I know that corruption exists in game reviews…I mean I could even point out a review or two that I think was clearly influenced by corruption.

Regardless though, when I have to choose between a review score aggregate by professionals that may be influenced externally, and a review score aggregate by the drooling masses that will commonly make snap judgments about games and give them 0’s or 10’s based on a 4 minute experience…I will go with the former option.

Also, I think that reviews by the popular YouTube personalities, like Angry Joe, are really good places to check as well. I don’t think these guys are as subject to the corruption as a gaming site is that depends on interviews and cooperation from publishers for their revenue, and these guys tend to give very detailed professional reviews.

Just wait until you hit end-game.

It goes from a 9/10 to an 7/10 really quick.

Snaylor.2760:

Just wait until you hit end-game.

It goes from a 9/10 to an 7/10 really quick.

Bwahaha, what? Disappointed there’s no raidng?

Jeez, it’s not like we didn’t know what there was/wasn’t in this game when we started playing.

Game went from a 9/10 to a 9.5/10 for me when I hit 80 on my Guardian. Orr is a blast. Crafting got excitingly powerful. New goals formed.

Amiron.1067:

Snaylor.2760:

Just wait until you hit end-game.

It goes from a 9/10 to an 7/10 really quick.

Bwahaha, what? Disappointed there’s no raidng?

Jeez, it’s not like we didn’t know what there was/wasn’t in this game when we started playing.

Game went from a 9/10 to a 9.5/10 for me when I hit 80 on my Guardian. Orr is a blast. Crafting got excitingly powerful. New goals formed.

Thats a first my entire guild is pretty much sitting around uncomplaining switching back to *.

marianitten.1247:

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

marianitten.1247:

Auction House Tycoon 3 is an average game. Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game / launch issues.

The user score of Metacritic , it’s the worst source of good reviews. The worst.

Here, I fixed it for you.

average game? Best dungeon crawler today…
Users give a lot of zeros because they were lied to about what was in the game.. give me an example please. Diablo 3 is Diablo 2 with today technology. What did you expect? Call Of Duty 5?

Path of Exile resembles Diablo 2 more IMO than D3 ever will lol.