Does anyone here has the same feeling that gamers today seam to label games as ethere "THE BEST $HIT EVA!!!" or "TOTAL TRASH!!!"?

I mean, can't a game be just good? No "high budget AAA, OMG, classic series remake!!!" bs. Just a solid product that will provide you with some fun entertainment.

It seams to be the most visible with game scores, where anything bellow a 8/10 is considered a failure. And sometimes even an 8 is seen bad. I'm looking at you Square Enix!

Well, you have made a pretty average post 4/10.

There are other posts out there on this. There are no inbetweens in life anymore, social media (and media in general) is there to polarise society against each other, be it in gaming or anything else. You have to be extreme one way or the other, otherwise you have two rampaging mobs after you...

Those reviews are posted either by someone with an agenda or easily impressionable kids. The way I see it, to say something is the best/worst ever means admitting you're haven't seen much in your life because you have few experiences to compare with. Easily impressionable kids deal only in absolutes and are under the influence of the moment, until they move on to the next thing.

If it makes you feel any better, while obviously not applying to games, the use of 'BEST EVER' goes back to the beginning of time.

Sadly, I think those days are gone. The reason for this is that a game company likes to announce the budget for their game, cough, cough Rockstar, cough, cough. I believe for this is that people would like to know what the budget is for a game, because they believe that the bigger the budget means a better experience with that game.
I think the reason that a game that received an 8 or below a failure is because they were striving towards an 9 or 10. And going along with the budget, the companies believe that the score should reflect on what they had spent on that game.

I think this is the thread you are looking for:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/ratings_why_do_so_many_people_on_the_internet_use_them_like_this/page1

A good chunk of the problem is people treating reviews as just another outlet to garner attention. They don't just want to write a review, they want to write a highly rated review, and that means taking an extreme position. "This game sucks" is boring. "This game literally murdered my dog because it looked at the graphics and they were so hideous it vomited until it died of dehydration" gets other idiots to click the 'like' button.

Professional and semi-professional game reviewers actually have fun by trying to come up with better, funnier, and more provocative ways of bashing games they consider mediocre or worse. That's how it's been for decades, and Internet has made it worse. I'm not going to say anything about amateurs who post stuff online under anonymity.

Also, grading scales are very biased. If grades run from 0 to 100, you might expect the line between better and worse games being somewhere around 50, but in reality it's somewhere around 75-80. So there's very few points available for good games, but almost three times as much for bad games.

If a game gets a score of 65, it's not "better than average", it's "very bad".

This is one of the reasons why I have mostly stopped reading game reviews, and cancelled subscriptions of game magazines.

When I write my own reviews somewhere on the Internet, I always leave out all kinds of grades. Not points from 0 to 100, not stars from 1 to 5, no letters from F to A. Nothing.

If you can't tell in the text what is good and what is bad about the game, and if the reader doesn't have patience to read the actual text, then the entire review is pointless.


And to answer the underlying question about how games are these days, I think there are less gems and less garbage these days than before. (Not counting hobbyists using some make-a-game tools.) Technology offers so good possibilities these days that it's very hard to create a real stinker. On the other hand, with thousands of games and major companies not willing to take creative risks, the best-selling titles are not very innovative or interesting.

So most games these days would probably fall into that 60-80 points range, if that was used, and if the scale was balanced properly.

Some of my best game experiences in the last years come directly from some of the BEST 7/10 GAMES EVER!

No exaggeration. ^_^

But, seriously, people in general, don't pay much attention to things that aren't spectacular. If your budget and time are limited, and most people's are, you're gonna spend them in only the best and still somewhat familiar experience you can get. Companies know that, and since they always favor simple strategies with as much return as possible, they focus on what they know, or think they know will sell extremely well.

I know I've read somewhere about how companies can't afford to produce mid budget games anymore, so we usually end up having either massively expensive AAAs or super cheap indies, I just don't remember where.

Ah, the good old days. Not like nowadays, no. Those days were the best ever.

XD Actually I'm a firm believer that man has been full of shit since the day he crawled out of the primordial ooze.

"OMG - Eve! BEST. APPLE. EVAR!"

I call that Resident Evil 6 syndrome. People jumped on the "worst game ever" bandwagon and rode it extremely hard. When in reality, Resident Evil 6 is a consistently good solid game. Nothing ground breaking or amazing but not bad either. It's just good and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yes, and they are so generically good that it may take some time for people to realize they offer just the bare minimum.

I'm not even sure how I could review a game nowaday, the last time I tried, I was met with death threat for not aknowledging and praising a pseudo-niche game the way people wanted me to do.

I've been playing Watch_Dogs 2 lately, heard mostly negative reviews, it's actually decently fun. Not game of the century worthy but again, not many are.

Curious tho', do you write reviews in english and if so, care to share ?

I think the issue really comes from a combination of 2 things:

First, have you ever seen the "we will never forget" things from the US about 9/11/2001? You know, how one day we're like we are now, then the very next day there seems to be a US flag flying at every home? They said we'd never forget, that the terrorists managed to unite america and we threw away our identity politics, forever, to realize that there's a bigger threat to each other than what someone says on the internet, whether someone said a mean comment about some identity group (which no longer exists, 'cause we're simply "americans"), etc. Yep, and if you believed them then, I have a bridge to sell you right now. Advertising is so hype based, that the hype train takes over our minds.

Second, with all the focus on hype advertising and all the research into what makes us tick, a particular game being good seems to be more about whether or not we feel we're getting duped. The Witcher 3 comes out, and we can bang a bunch of women as Geralt, the man who is more manly than all the men of he forum combined, and we don't feel like we're being exploited. Huniepop comes out, same thing, and we don't feel exploited. Fallout 76 comes out, we feel exploited. At the end of the day, the things today are going for our lizard brain, with sex, likes, socialization, etc, trying to appeal to every single base need and/or desire that we have, just to get us to give them our coin, and if it works, we feel great and it's one of the best, since it appeals to everything. However, if we feel manipulated by a micro-transaction or something, every single thing they did to make the game appeal to us instantly becomes bad, which is the majority of the game, therefore it's total trash.

Now, try applying this to a woman you meet at a bar, party, or something like that. Or maybe a girlfriend or even a boyfriend. Ultimately, we are doing the same thing, and do we not get the same results? The person whom we can actually put up with are the most amazing ever, but once those same people fall out of our favor by cheating or something like that, instantly they are the worst human beings we've ever encountered. Just as i've noticed the longest lasting relationships are the ones where people aren't focused on being perfect from the get-go, i've noticed the games that seem to keep their appeal going the longest are the ones that aren't trying to appeal to everything. I mean, sure, there's always that one woman out there that can make your mouth drop from day 1 but you can also keep her 'til old age (especially with some cosmetic surgery), but not everyone can be Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim.
Eh, i give it a 4 out of 10. It was entertaining, but the elements that sucked really sucked. Well, when talking about "professional reviews," one need only mention gamergate. That's all there is to that: if you want a good review, you better pay well, put out, or something like that. Otherwise, if you're actually good, you're mediocre at best. Now days, mediocre is bad.