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After the release of death loop, I was reminded of an event that took place
several years ago. Another arcane title was about to release, this one called Prey. As is typical,
review codes were sent out to press in the weeks leading up to the game's launch so that they could
inform their audiences of the games Merritt. And it was pretty good, even great according to some,
but an evaluation of the games overall quality isn't what we're here to discuss.
Rather, I want to talk about what IGN did that caused the internet to devolve into pure madness.
You see, one of IGN's reviewers, Dan Stapleton , WAS TASKED WITH REVIEWING THE GAME ON PC.
HE ENJOYED HIS TIME WITH IT, BUT AFTER 34 hours ENCOUNTERED A GAME-BREAKING glitch which corrupted
all of his save files. And so, he did what all of us reviewers and critics do in these situations,
he reached out to his press contact, and they provided a new save file
and instructed him to perform a clean installation of the game (among other things). However, he
encountered the same issue again and after hours of troubleshooting concluded that this bug was
so prevalent in the pre-launch version of the game that he couldn't complete it. Furthermore,
at the time, Bethesda Softworks, the game’s publisher, said that they were “hopeful
[they’d] have a fix soon,” though they refused to give a firm answer as to when this would come.
Now this all makes sense, and he should receive some credit for calling out the
game for shortcomings, after all, if a bug that prevents you from playing the game doesn't qualify
as something worth noting in a review I don't know what would. But IGN’s editors decided to do
something novel, they still asked him to put a rating on the game. So he did, giving it
a four out of 10 saying he liked a lot of what they were doing here, but that the game was so
broken for him on PC that he couldn’t finish it. Needless to say, the internet went wild.
As all of the reviews for the game started to pour in, one thing was very clear,
those who finished the game really enjoyed it. It was receiving eights,
nines, and even a few scant tens. The evaluation was unanimous, the game was
really good. And the common thread between all of these reviews is that while bugs were
acknowledged, especially in PC reviews where most of the issues seemed to be present, they didn't
actively detract from the scores, at least not significantly. This made IGN's PC review of Prey
stick out like a sore thumb, and soon gamers from all over the world were letting them know.
The YouTube video of the review was downvoted into oblivion, Mr. Stapleton, the reviewer,
faced untold multitudes of tweets and DM's criticizing his work, and the internet came
together to agree that IGN had once again put out a terrible review [TOO MUCH WATER]. But let's
look at this objectively. The crime that had allegedly been committed was that a reviewer
had given a game a very poor score as a result of it being broken upon his testing. His rating was
a reflection of his experience, and his experience was a bad one. He enjoyed most of the parts of the
game that he played, which is why he still gave it a four instead of a one, but the review was meant
to be a reflection of his time with it, as all reviews are intended to be, at least according
to any definition that I've ever come across. Some said that he shouldn't have given it a
four out of ten because Bethesda softworks, the game's publisher, assured him that they
were working on a fix and such a bad review in light of the incoming fix wasn’t fair.
But I don't think this protestation is fair. Reviewers' jobs are to evaluate a product,
specifically, the one that is before them. You don't get to assume that the issue you've
encountered will be fixed by launch day. Sure, you can ask the publisher if it will be, and it's
up to that individual reviewer's discretion as to whether or not they trust the answer
they get back. If we flashback to the release of cyberpunk 2077, all of us reviewers were assured
that major bug fixes would be implemented with the day one patch on launch day, some reviewers
took CDPR at their word, believing that the team that made The Witcher 3 wouldn't dare lie to them.
As a result, their reviews looked pretty ridiculous. Others blindly ignored the bugs and
confidently declared the game a masterpiece, only to change their tune upon the game’s launch and,
in some cases, even deleting their prior videos on the game to try and wipe the slate clean.
The point is, there's never a clear way of determining whether or not you can trust what
is said to you, which is why it's usually safer to just go off of the product you have received.
But all of this begs the central question at the heart of this debate:
was this Fair? It’s a very good question,
and I’ll answer it in just a moment, but first, thank you to our sponsor, Squarespace.
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I will be the first to come out and say that I think it was,
if anything, giving it a four when the product was broken was overly generous. And considering
that the review was amended after the bug was patched about a week after launch, there really
was no long-term damage done. The point is that it simply didn't work on PC for this reviewer,
and many other PC players on launch day, might I add. And so, in evaluating the game that he was
provided, Dan gave the game a rating that reflected his experience. It's as simple as that.
And I think that sounds pretty reasonable. But then why were people so upset?
Well we could refer to the stereotypical neckbeard gamer who simply wants to rage in opposition
to someone who doesn't like the same thing they like. But I think that would be low-hanging fruit.
I think the actual explanation is more complicated and interesting.
On the one hand, I think it is true that for many people the four out of 10 reading was perceived as
an attack and insult levied against one of their favorite developers. Furthermore, these same
people felt that this rating was unfair, because One reviewer having a bad experience with the game
isn't indicative of the titles quality across the board. Which is certainly true,
but One reviewer cannot possibly take into consideration the experience of literally everyone
else on the planet when reviewing a game prior to launch. Remember, when we lucky few who are giving
review copies are working on our write-ups before the embargo lifts, we are doing so in the dark.
We don't know if other reviewers are going to give this game at 10, at 9, or four, we are
entirely isolated, which is the way it should be. But the point is, he couldn't go and ask people at
Gamespot, other YouTubers, and read it what they think of the game and therefore their opinion is
that this one game breaking bug should result in a heavy penalization of its review score. Or at the
very least they're not supposed to do that, though I'm sure some people send Twitter DMS to other
personalities online to find out what they think of a game. The point is, we're back to square one,
you can only review a game based on what your experience with it is. it hasn't launched yet
and so the only thing you know about it is that you are not able to finish it because it's broken.
On the other hand, some felt as though the issues Dan was encountering were a result of
his own technical difficulties, and so holding the game responsible wasn't reasonable. To this day,
you can see plethora comments from large YouTubers making this very point. Such as
this one from Joseph Anderson, who I know a lot of my audience follow, where he's arguing that
it doesn't seem as though Dan verified that these bugs were result of something Arcane did wrong,
meaning that it could have been an issue with one of his storage devices, the hard drive
he stored the game on, or some sort of driver incompatibility. And I will say, I think this
is a fair question to ask. Blaming the game for Hardware malfunctions would be akin to criticizing
the construction of your new Tesla because you drove it off a bridge. But what we do know is
that Dan was in active communication with the support staff at Bethesda softworks. So much so
that they were even providing him replacement save files so that he could continue his run
through the campaign. So I would say that if this were an issue with the hardware,
short of something incredibly severe which would likely be present in other games as well,
the IT staff that was helping him would probably have picked up on it. And if you were to say
that it could have been a driver issue oh, I would point out that if there were driver
incompatibilities with the games software and your graphics Hardware, the onus was on Bethesda
to provide a beta driver to allow reviewers to experience the game properly. And this is a very
common thing, in fact, one of the reviews I did recently required installation of a beta driver
for AMD graphics cards To maximize performance. And lastly, I would point out that this was a bug
that they were able to fix within about a week of the game's launch. If this was an issue with
a faulty hard drive or something of the sort, Not only would it have been relegated just to Dan's
play through, which it wasn't, in fact one of my college buddies ran into this exact same issue on
launch day, but it also wouldn't have been easily patched with a 50 mb update. But at the time that
these comments were made, and that the review dropped, nobody knew if this issue was widespread
or if it was Dan's doing. Yet, even so, countless YouTubers and Gamers took to the comment section
to let IGN know that they were probably the problem and so criticizing the game wasn't fair.
But I think the other element to this debacle that must be addressed
is just how much this review stood out against the pack. Almost no one else brought up major
technical issues in their reviews. Most of the people who played the game on PC did reference
bugs and glitches, I know because I read through their reviews using the wayback machine. But the
key difference was that they, for one, didn't seem to encounter this game breaking bug, and secondly,
they didn't think it was fair to heavily penalize the game as a result of the bugs that they did
encounter. As a result of this difference in experience and review methodology, IGN looked
as though they were simply trying to drive clicks by way of controversy, when in reality
their reviewer was simply presenting a rating that was reflective of his time with the game.
Maybe I'm a hard-ass, but I think Games should be penalized for bugs, performance issues, and
certainly issues that prevents you from playing the game outright whether it be crashes, soft
locs, or save file corruption's. This is why I penalized Far Cry 6 when I reviewed that recently,
and why I consider Man of Medan to be one of the worst games I've ever paid money for; it's also
why I made a 5-hour critique going through the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077. And this is where it's
simply a matter of your perspective and opinion. Some think it's not relevant to dwell on bugs and
glitches like these. If the game doesn't work on your system, it's just not for you. Or calling out
all of the issues in cyberpunk 2077, while an accurate description of the game's state, will
lead countless people into a position where they will refuse to play the game, potentially missing
out on a remarkable, though buggy, experience. It really is just a matter of your personal tolerance
for bugs and lack of Polish. For a decade people made excuses for Bethesda game studios titles and
all of the bugs that came along with them, but in 2015 The Gaming Community decided they had had
enough and that they were going to demand better, that Studios shouldn't be able to release broken
games that require mods to become playable. Some hold to this new doctrine and others to the old.
But all of this brings us to the present day implication of this debacle. As a result of IGN
going rogue with this review, nowadays we don't see major publications taking quite as strong a
stand as this which, I think, is often necessary. Take deathloop for example, another game from
arcane, the game that triggered my memory of this event and inspired me to make this video. This
game had a lot of issues at launch. I, and many others online, encountered numerous bugs including
one which broke the menus and forced you to close the app and restart the game, loading into I save
at the start of the day losing out on potentially 30 to 45 minutes of progress. I for one ran into
this multiple times and it was infuriating each time. This bug didn't prevent me from progressing
through the story, but it did heavily encumber my journey to the end credits. I would consider this
a major bug, one that forces the game to close and results in the player losing hours of progress
over the course of their run. I think it's fair to heavily penalize a game that launches with such an
issue, after all, if we were reviewing a car that randomly stalled out and forced you to pull over
and restart the engine to continue, only to break down a few hours later until a post-purchase patch
was sent out, we would rightly be infuriated that the manufacturer considered this
acceptable. Simply, we are evaluating a product which was given to us broken with the promise of
future repairs. It doesn't matter if it's Bethesda game studios doing it, arcane, or CD projekt Red.
It's unethical, unacceptable, and should be called out when it occurs. If reviewers
don't vocalize disdain for such actions then the publishers and developers will continue to do it,
and likely will become more bold as time goes by, something we saw quite clearly with Bethesda game
studios releases from the 360/ps3 era leading into the PS4 and Xbox One era.
Playing nice and declining to call out major bugs and issues in games for sake of avoiding
online outrage may make practical sense on the part of editors and reviewers who want to avoid
the Twitter hate storm, but it doesn't help the industry, it doesn't help the consumer who might
waste their money on a game that's broken when they purchase it, and it certainly isn't the
honest thing to do. Sure, we could say that gamers shouldn't become so outraged at reviews of games
they enjoy but come to opposite conclusions, but that's a much bigger fish to fry. The point is,
reviewers should have the balls to call out studios that try to release games with major
issues, regardless of how beloved the studio is, how successful their games have been in the past,
and how irrationally sycophantic their fans may be. So even if you were someone who thought that
IGN's review of prey on PC back in the day was just another example of them being ridiculous,
hopefully now you can look back and appreciate it for what it was, someone taking a stand,
calling out a developer and publisher for sending out a broken game for review,
and refusing to bow to the hate mob that was inevitably going to follow.