Reviews for this game are almost always stupid
Dont get me wrong I like how this game is popular and has a good wrap. But holy hell are the companies reviewing and saying good builds are ignorant. Like they don't even know that toxic builds are not something this community likes and they make a list about it, the tier lists are by people who barely played this game. Hell I just seen a review by PC magazine and they said that this game is perfect for esports and it can be like a future MOBA or FPS not exactly from.mechanics but its style. Anyone here knows that that is impossible. Not every killer can stand up to that pressure so no this game os not esports ready. Hell they said veteran players spend months to find optimal paths for GHOSTFACE. He is literally easy as crap til higher ranks. I mained him as a baby and wrecked everyone and when people learn of his ability its hard but months to learn how to use his ability is far fetched. At least to me. No disrespect to companies, I enjoy their efforts l just think the things they say are funny and dumb, stemming from ignorance that comes from.not playing this game long enough.
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When Cuphead came out the reviewer couldn't get past the tutorial stage for like an hour or something. As gamers that would be unheard of, but these guys that do those reviews normally don't play video games as a hobby and are writing them for people who don't play video games.
I mean, they've gotta do something, right?
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https://www.pcgamer.com/dead-by-daylight-review/
In case anybody wants to read the review for themselves.
But yes, i do agree with OP. The reviewer sounds like they put in a few hours into the game before writing. Which is fine, I suppose, but it gives the wrong impression
I did like how they pointed out that the more experienced you are, the less the 'horror' part of the game fades. Was a good call.
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Please tell me that’s not true.
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It is... People that write articles usually aren't gamers but plain journalists so if they have to post something about a specific game they'll just watch a few clips and maybe try it a little before doing their work so they usually have no idea what they're talking about but people that read them articles usually have no clue either so no one notices.
A german DBD article mentioned how unfair original Ormond was claiming it was too easy to find survivors due to the bright environment making it a killer-sided map.
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Former editor for multiple video game magazines and websites here.
What you're saying in this post, it just simply isn't true at all. The people who write for enthusiast outlets -- like PC Gamer, IGN, GameSpot, and what-have-you -- are largely gamers first, and writer/editor/whatever their job title is second. They came to it because they love the games, and have the perspective of a passionate enthusiast (believe me when I say they didn't get into it because the job paid well). Note that this might not be 100% the case with a non-enthusiast outlet (think Newsweek or Wired or something), but I assure you that those kinds of places definitely dip into the same freelancer pool, too.
The thing about reviewing games on a deadline is that it can sometimes be very hard to get a complete, really accurate picture of absolutely everything that a game has to offer, especially when it has some sort of complex/emergent multiplayer component or an extremely broad scope. I can't speak for the PC Gamer reviewer and have no idea what the terms of the assignment looked like, but this review barely cracks 700 words, and that is definitely not enough space to cover everything with a game like this. This is someone who probably has what the 2,000+ hour players here would consider a very surface-level knowledge of the game.
I can see how a relatively inexperienced player would, say, find Ormond to be a killer-sided map because it is bright. That is because the game communicates some very wrongheaded information to players, and a reviewer doesn't always have the space to sort all of that out. Game developers sometimes do a very poor job of onboarding their audience and providing reviewers with strong support, and this leads to a lot of avoidable misconceptions (and DBD has some of the worst onboarding and UX I have personally ever experienced in a video game of this scope). I'm not laying any of this at the feet of this particular reviewer or outlet, I'm just explaining how the review process for a game like this can lead to a review that doesn't capture the whole picture.
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Also, re: that Cuphead story. Video game reviewers aren't necessarily good at games. I remember when Dark Souls came out, there was a whole "Dark Souls reviewer support group" sort of mailing list between editors and writers who were covering the game on deadline. Keza MacDonald (who reviewed the game for IGN) co-wrote a very good book about this called "You Died: The Dark Souls Companion."
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Thank you for giving me a better idea about all that. Appreciate it really.
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No problem. And I was not trying to call you out or anything like that -- just giving some context on how this looks from the reviewer's side.
There have been plenty of times in my career when I have, say, dedicated 40 hours (what a normal person would consider to be a full work week) to a game, in order to produce a 1,000 word review. A very experienced DBD player would look at that and go "You can't even begin to understand this game or even get anything unlocked with that little time put into it!" But for someone who is reviewing it on assignment, that's their entire week, which is a significant amount of time. And I don't recognize that reviewer's name from the PC Gamer masthead, which means it's probably a freelancer who did this, got paid some tragically small amount for the effort, and had to move on to some other assignment.
Games continue to get more complicated -- game-as-service stuff (like DBD) even more so. It unfortunately doesn't make things any easier for reviewers who have finite time to dedicate to any one thing.
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I thought it was an excellent review. The review only really needs to go as far as to sway you into buying it or not buying it. I don't expect the reviewer to put several hundred hours in first.
Many on the forums would give it a low rating and complain about the balance, matchmaking and the bugs, but how many hours do they have? If you have hundreds of hours on a game, you probably like it enough to get value from your purchase. So maybe it isn't so bad after all?
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Yeah, agreed. The DBD faithful -- the people who inhabit these forums and have dedicated hundreds of hours to the game already -- are not the audience for a review like this. I sometimes get the feeling that a lot of people here have played this game to the degree that they are just hollowed-out, Malcolm Tucker-esque husks that exist as avatars to play and talk about this game. 😀
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Yes. Pick a different job for example.
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The only people who have the right to review a certain game are people who have played that certain game for a long period of time. Not just someone who played for 45 minutes and never touched the game again.
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You are not really understanding the economics of how a game review works.
If this guy spent, to use my previous example, a full 40-hour work week playing this game in order to file this 750-word review, that's a huge chunk of time to dedicate to one single paid assignment, but 40 hours is a drop in the bucket when it comes to really understanding a game like this. But from the standpoint of someone who is doing this for pay -- and I'm going to be really amazingly generous and assume he got something like $250 for this assignment -- that's a LOT of time and energy spent before moving on to whatever the next thing is.
When I was the reviews editor for Computer Gaming World, we paid freelancers $0.50 per word (and this was in the good times). This was a while back so it's a struggle for me to remember the exact details (this was mid-2000s) -- but I want to say our average review length was about 1,100 words for 2 pages ($550), 600 words for 1 page ($300), and 250 words for a half-page ($125). It was a challenge to, say, find someone to review an MMO, because it just wasn't worth the time they would have to dedicate to it, as they needed to have time to dedicate to other assignments so they could continue to eke out a living and pay their bills.
The bottom has definitely fallen out on pay rates and such since the good old magazine days too, so these freelancers are probably being paid even less today. And I know from talking to friends at other outlets, and who have more recent press experience than I do, that reviews have some of the worst ROI of any content on a website, because they take forever and don't get the eyeballs that gameplay videos or a feed of constant news stories do. So from everyone's perspective (the writer and the editorial staff), dedicating the time and effort to a really deep and comprehensive video game review is really hard to justify.
TL;DR You're looking at this from the tunnel-vision perspective of a fan, not as someone who writes for a living. The economics are pretty harsh, especially, specifically for reviews, in terms of time spent versus what it earns you.
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Of course I'm not coming at this from that perspective, I'm not a professional writer. My point is, from an outsider perspective, or from the perspective of any non long time player, this game seems to be really good. But if you've been playing this game for a long time you know it has issues that make it not recommendable.
That's why I say only people who have a true understanding of the game and its flaws should be taken seriously when it's reviewed.
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PC gaming journalism, ironically, died with the rise of the internet.
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But the thing is, the kind of reviewer you're describing -- a super knee-deep-in-the-mud player -- is just not the kind of person who is reviewing this game, let alone any game, for a magazine or a website. That's not the way any review for any game like this works. At best, an editor will have access to writers who are genre specialists. Like, say, I know off-hand who I would solicit to review a new Civilization or StarCraft game, because they know strategy games really well. And while that person knows strategy games really well, chances are they aren't spending all of their time playing one specific game to death. DBD is still kind of alone in this class of games, so there's not a huge frame of reference that can make someone a genre specialist, in the same way.
To go back to my earlier MMO example, it was always super-difficult to find people to review MMO expansions, since by their very nature, you had to find someone who had been playing that particular game all along. For something massive like World of Warcraft, that was pretty easy cuz everyone was playing it -- but at every magazine and website I worked for, we almost always neglected to review MMO expansions because we couldn't find writers who could dive into whatever the particular game was.
In a perfect world, what you're saying would be the ideal scenario. But that is just not how it works out, for all the myriad real-world reasons I have conveyed here. The economics are part of how any type of coverage of this nature works.
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Being good at games and being able to write about games are two very, very different skill sets, and in my experience there is not always a ton of overlap. I have known plenty of aspiring writers who are really good at a given game or genre of game, and even really articulate when speaking about them -- but could not write a sentence to save their life. Writing is a skill, it does not come easy to everyone, and there are a lot of people who try to get into the business of writing about games because they love the games but are not good writers. The bar has unfortunately always been very low in this regard (@Rhoska -- yes, even back before the rise of the Internet, I assure you).
As an editor, 10 times out of 10, I will go with the person who is the better writer, rather than the stronger player, because all of your game knowledge is worthless if you can't convey it well. Not to mention, it's a waste of time for an editor to spend their day trying to salvage an unreadable piece of copy.
Also, you're speaking as though there is no value in an analysis that says "Hey, this is so hard I couldn't even beat the tutorial!" That's a good piece of information to have! A game like Cuphead isn't for everyone, and this kind of experience gives the reader something to think about, in terms of whether or not this game is their cup of tea.
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What you are saying is a complete nonsense. Taking in consideration mentioned by you Cuphead, that game journalist had no credibility whatsoever because that practise level was not hard at all. What that journalist gave us was not a review, but misinformation, since he didn't even read instructions until he failed 10+ times and made it look like this game was incredibly hard. I would never listen to someone who tries to tell you about something he has no idea about, especially in criticism.
So no, I completely disagree with you. And I would rather see rough and plain truth from someone who knows what he does, instead of a glorified article from a person who never commits to his doings. We saw that kind of attitude everywhere today, The Last of Us Part 2 is a prime evidence to that.
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I'm just using Cuphead as my example because it's the game you mentioned. I have no idea what the circumstances around this particular thing are -- what/where this coverage was, whether it was a game review, just some gameplay B-roll, a hands-on preview, or whatever. With a difficult game (and different people have different experience in terms of what they find difficult), any number of things could be a roadblock depending on what the coverage arrangement was. If it was a game review, then yeah, of course I'd expect the reviewer's criticism to come from somewhere measured and non-shallow; what I'm saying is that the perspective of "this is really hard and I could not beat it and here's why" has value on its own, because some readers are likely to share that experience, too.
Again, I have no idea what specific Cuphead coverage you're referring to or what the hoopla over it is; I was just pulling that game out because you had mentioned it previously. It's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison with DBD since it is a single-player game that averages about 10 hours to beat its main story (but it's a good touchstone for talking about how the more difficult games end up getting covered).
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@Xayrlen I have done some Googling and I assume you are referring to this, VentureBeat's hands-on gameplay footage of Cuphead from Gamescom 2017:
You're being a bit unfair here, because this isn't even a game review. It's a journalist playing an early build of a game on the show floor of a convention. I'm well-aware of what a show like Gamescom looks like for a journalist (I covered E3 in a professional capacity for 12 years), and you cannot reasonably expect someone to have a full grasp on a game they are seeing for the first time, that they are just there to capture early preview footage for on a show floor, when they inevitably have a 30-minute window before they get cut off and/or have to move on to their next appointment.
Again, this is not a game review, it's just some footage. They even specify in the video description that this person was the only one there covering the show for this outlet (and given that this is just VentureBeat and they had to travel all the way to Germany for it, that stretched-thin budget does not surprise me at all). And also, that he's not well-versed in platformers. And they poke fun at the fact that he's not great at it, they're not hiding that or trying to claim otherwise. But this isn't even a critique, it's just direct capture footage from a convention floor. So yeah, you apparently don't even know what you're criticizing here.
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