Kudos to the Eurogamers editor for the way they’re handling it though. Two important things in that written response: 1. the editor stands behind his reviewer 100% and refuses to print a retraction and 2. rather than telling the original reviewer to walk the coals and re-review the game, making a public spectacle of his contributor, he is bringing in a big name to give it a fair review from another perspective.

The Social D mention up there was appreciated Tipa, great band! :)

I’m not expecting a detailed review of the endgame. I just need to know if it’s worth my while paying for a month to make up my own mind. So I expect to learn what the heart of the game is about, how it plays, what the good and bad points are, and who the typical fan might be. Don’t need to be told if I’ll still want to play in 6 months time, no reviewer can know that.

I do think blogs/ ongoing reviews are pretty big for MMOs, but you don’t need that much info to decide whether or not to try it.

Cutting away all the fanboy / anti fanboy rant is a very simple issue. Aventurine claim that a reviewer only spent minutes in their game before writing a review. If that is true the review is a fraud. The reviewer on the other hand claims to have spent nine hours in the game. Nine hours is not nearly enough to give a thorough overview of an mmorpg but it is enough to get an impression of the new player experience. If the reviewer is telling the truth then we (and Aventurine) need to accept that in his opinion the new player experience of Darkfall is just that bad.

You make a very valid point about the difficulty of reviewing an MMORPG at all. Perhaps the solution is to accept that every early review of an mmorpg cannot be anything more than an impression of the new player experience and for reviewer to admit as much in their writing.

Let me say it this way…

I have two games in my hand…Darkfall and LOTRO.

I would instantly subscribe to LOTRO for a year!

Nuff’ said