A word to bloggers about reviewing MMOs I play.
Posted by Tipa in Darkfall, EverQuest 2, Free Realms, MMOs, Wizard 101
In the aftermath of the scandal surrounding Darkfall and its 2/10 Eurogamer review, I just have a couple of things to say.
You Darkfall players and those bloggers up in arms because they didn’t play it sufficiently enough to get a good picture of the game? Listen up.
Are you the ones who write about EverQuest II that the starting areas are drab and some screenshot you saw a few years ago wasn’t bright enough for you? Weren’t able to figure out the skills or heroic opportunities and pronounced it broken? Wondered why I stuck with the game even though it clearly wasn’t as good as WoW?
YOU FAIL. I don’t go into WoW, play the first 20 levels and then pass judgment on the entire game. Don’t come into EQ2 and futz around in the starting area and say the game is a massive pile of excrement. You CAN say the game doesn’t appeal to you on your first impression, but that’s ALL you can say.
By the way, I played WoW to 60 pre-BC, raided Molten Core, Onyxia, that instance in STV and a bunch of world bosses, and I don’t have a thing to say about anything POST-BC because I never played it.
And those people who looked at Wizard 101 and maybe played around awhile in Wizard City and then wrote that you just seemed to play the same card again and again and the fights were too simple and you didn’t like the open group scheme? Guess what?
Wizard City is a giant TUTORIAL. It’s SUPPOSED to be easy. You don’t start hitting the real meat of the game until Colossus Blvd because this is a game meant to be easy enough for kids to play. By the time you finish Marleybone, you’ll have an idea of how complex and deep the game REALLY is. Don’t think your experiences in the first ten levels qualify you to give a score to W101.
Last year, I challenged bloggers to pick a game and stick with it an entire year, because I felt at the time that that’s how long it took to really appreciate all the complexity of an MMO. I chose Wizard 101 as my ‘year’ game. No matter how frustrated I got with the game, I stood by it and stuck with it. Clearly it didn’t take a year to see and do everything, so maybe next time I take my own challenge, six months will be enough.
Wizard 101 may not be your kind of game, and that’s totally legit. Nobody is going to stand around saying you have to like it. But until you’ve spent a hundred hours going through at least the first three worlds — because Marleybone is a gem that should not be missed — you don’t know enough about the game to review it.
See, when you’re a player, playing for fun, if a game isn’t fun for you, you should find a game that IS. But when you’re blogging about a game you haven’t played much, all you can say is, “my own initial impressions based on the starting zone was…”. If you insist that you are writing a REVIEW, then I better read how you liked the END GAME, because if you haven’t even had as much experience with the game as the players who will read your article, where’s your credibility?
I have not read even ONE true review of Wizard 101. It went into beta in July and live September and I have seen a lot of articles with “review” in the title, but none of the reviewers had ever leveled a character through Marleybone at the time of the article.
I have not written a Wizard 101 review, and I won’t, because my review is in the articles I’ve written about leveling through the game.
Free Realms has been live for a week, and I’ve seen a bunch of reviews for the game that seem to be based mainly on the tutorial and playing a few minigames. Where are the articles about taking a balanced group into a three-pip dungeon? Where are the articles telling me the relative worth of the wizard or the archer for ranged dps? Is it better to start with a brawler or a ninja? How are the cash shop items? Which pet dog sniffs out the rare collections best? That’s not part of your review?
Then HOW can you call it a review? You haven’t even played the game yet?
So, people up in arms because of a perfunctory Darkfall review, remember this next time you see a review for a game where the reviewer clearly saw only a fraction of the content and an even smaller bit of the game play: They don’t know what they’re talking about. They are all lying when they call their article a “review” instead of a “first impressions”. I expect the replacement Eurogamer “review” includes building a city and defending it from attackers, some sea battles would be good to cover, and what their death/kill ratio was in PvP. How can I expect any less from someone who is claiming to review Darkfall?
And here’s a coda: MMOs aren’t something you can ever write about without putting yourself in the article, because MMOs are as much about the community as the game itself, and if you aren’t part of the community, then you aren’t playing the full game. At least Eurogamer’s reviewer admitted he hated Darkfall from the start. It would have been much worse if he had claimed to be neutral, but then let his hate for the very thought of the game seep into every word without admitting his bias.
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I might know if I am going to like a book or not just by looking at its cover or reading a couple of pages. By then I could probably say, this is a book I would probably like and I should buy it, or not.
I could turn on the radio (remember those?) and the music I hear I will probably like or not, right off. So I don’t buy the track or I turn to another station. Again, nobody is forcing me to listen to it.
But if I am reviewing a book or piece of music for people who know nothing about it, I’m not going to start off with, “Well, I hate MilSF, and this book was full of MilSF from the start. By Chapter 2 I knew I wasn’t going to see anything but MilSF, so I gave up. This book is 1/10. I hate MilSF.”
And though inspired by the Eurogamer Darkfall review, I never played the game, I don’t know how representative of the full game the first few hours are. But I have played EQ2 a lot, and W101 a lot, and not one review has accurately potrayed either game. Usually the bias is clear — EQ2 is not WoW, and W101 is not just a kid’s WoW. I am SICK TO DEATH of having every MMO explicitly or implicitly compared to WoW. If you can’t judge a game on its OWN merits, you don’t deserve to be a reviewer. Clearly the reviewer didn’t get involved in the heavily tactical battles that Syncaine writes of, and looks to be the real heart of the game, what everyone is looking for in the game. So that important part, not covered.
I’m an avid fan of MMO’s but I don’t like seeing them glorified in this fashion. You are saying, in effect, that every reviewer must take in as many aspects of the game as possible. Does a restaurant reviewer have to taste every entree? Would a normal game reviewer have to unlock all the extra content in the game?
If the reviewer is honest and says how much time he put into the review, why shouldn’t it be called a review? Who are you to try to claim semantics in order to marginalize what they’ve done? I suppose that waterboarding isn’t torture either, right? Because we can quip and tear these things apart until all good sense is called into question.
I suggest looking up the terms “review” and “impression” in the dictionary for clarification of just how wrong you are.
I understand what you’re saying. You think that the early levels don’t count. Personally, I won’t play an MMO that doesn’t start off fun and stay fun the whole way.(In other words, FFXI) EQ1 was good from the start, why shouldn’t other MMOs have to do at least as good as their predecessors? I played Wizard 101 as well, which I think sucked because it was too childish and I disliked the way fights were done. I didn’t need to play any more of it because I had my opinion made in the trial and no additions were going to change some basic flaws of the game. I knew I’d like WoW right out of the newbie zone. I was outfitted, given quests for direction, and levelling was fast. I played EQ2 for all of one minute before deciding I’d never play it again.
To top it all, in my small list of reviews…I played Vanguard: Saga of Heroes for one day and it’s the best MMORPG that has come out to date. It is the gamer’s secret. The Holy Grail.
One does not simply review into Mordor.
““Well, I hate MilSF, and this book was full of MilSF from the start. By Chapter 2 I knew I wasn’t going to see anything but MilSF, so I gave up. This book is 1/10. I hate MilSF.” – Tipa
If the reviewer was judging Darkfall’s content as a major factor in his scoring, I’d be keen to see your point a bit more. However, he was not. He was judging major systems. In truth, you should not require more than a couple of hours to determine whether or not a game’s major systems are fun or not. To say otherwise is to say that unless you’ve killed every raid target up through and including Anasti Sul, any review you make regarding raiding within Everquest II is automatically invalid. You don’t need to kill Anasti Sul to determine whether or not (A) you enjoy the general raid mechanics you’ve encountered and (B) you make a note of which raid content you’ve actually encountered.
The reviewer at Eurogamer did give a very solid indication of which content he encountered. He shouldn’t need to hit end-game content to say that he really dislikes the combat system. He shouldn’t need to join a guild and group up for a year to share an opinion on the item management system. The expectations you’re holding him to are simply unrealistic and impractical.
Even then, you seem stuck on the word “review”. I submit that Adventuretine’s problem had little to do with the word used to describe the type of article and had EVERYTHING to do with the low score. Furthermore, I submit that this is a manufactured drama designed to entice further discussion over a game that is being generally panned by critics – after all, there’s no such thing as bad press.
YOU FAIL. I don’t go into WoW, play the first 20 levels and then pass judgment on the entire game.
No, I think you also can do it without even playing the game (*cough* AoC *cough*)
Isn’t it weird? It is almost like they formed their opinion before even playing the game, and passed verdict before even playing it..lol
I remember doing it for WAR
Of course, when I finally played it, it was exactly what I thought it would be.
Was my opinion wrong?
But, we are bloggers, and as “bloggist’s” we should keep those opinions in our personal space. This reviewer was clearly wrong for posting it on Eurogamer…but it does not mean he as a player of the game was wrong..
This just goes to show though that Tasos can definitely rile up the masses, and he is one you do not want to catch the attention of…
And think about it…this piece is now officially a “Bad press = Good press” piece ala Grand Theft Auto..more copies will be sold (if you can even buy it…lol) now than ever before.
Darkfall actually wins!
I’ve been playing EQ2 from launch and just last week got my first character to 80 and I’m in a small guild that averages 4 – 5 active players (2 of whom are my wife and I). I’ve played WoW for well over the year you stipulated and never got to the end game and although I was in a guild that was raiding I never participated in that. I played EQ1 for over 6 years and went on a grand total of 1 PoP raid, 2 hate raids, 2 fear raids and both dragons when they were still raids. I’ve tried EvE a couple of times and never stuck but I’m still fascinated by the game and I know that if I had the time and energy to dedicate to it I’d be able to play it for well over a year and count the number of actual PvP fights I participated in on one hand because that’s not the part of the game that interests me.
An MMO reviewed based on your criteria of having to play for 100 hours and be in the “end game” and a guild etc. would not tell ME if the game is something I would like or not since I don’t play the “end game”. The problem with the theory that you have to experience the whole thing before you can review it is that there is no way, ever, to experience the whole of a good MMO. And how do you begin to even review a community? I’ve checked out the Darkfall forums and found them a cesspit of moronic adolescents but there are those that would disagree with me – I also think that the WoW forums are only a notch above those. I half my guild in WoW on ignore since I found them annoying but some of my friends found those very people witty, there’s just no accounting for taste.
So what most reviewers end up doing is reviewing the game play mechanics. Having just read the Eurogamer review that is mostly what I saw him complaining about. The mechanics are what will make or break a players initial experience in a game. Arcane movement systems and a feeling of “floaty-ness” in a supposedly action oriented PvP game are very important things to point out. What I mostly read in that review was that the reviewer found the mechanics of actually playing the game to be not fun and that was what the score reflected.
The problem I have with your article, Tipa, is that you are holding MMO reviews up to an impossibly high standard, though I can tell you do not see it as such. There should be an appropriate middle ground for review that allows for reviews to be written with any sort of timeliness. The reviews that are most egregious are the ones at put as little effort into playing the game as they do playing a standard video game. This is not a new problem in game reviews at all. FPS and RTS games that perform poorly in single player but flourish in multiplayer often receive poor scores because if the inability to invest oneself in that mode while under a deadline. Some allowance for an evolving review structure might be healthy for the long term of the industry. Demanding one year of a reviewer’s life before a word can be published is approaching insanity asymptotically.
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