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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Had the reviewer stated that not only does he hate DarkFall, but he hates the 14 minutes that he actually played, his ‘review’ would have been a non-issue. But when a major site puts up a review supposedly based on 9 hours of gameplay, and in that piece the author makes multiple statements that are just outright lies (not opinions), it’s a different matter.

What some bloggers decide to call ‘reviews’ based on X amount of time is not the issue, especially since they are just bloggers with no standards to adhere to. I could write today that EQ2 is a buggy mess that crashes every time I enter combat, and SOE won’t do a thing about it. People might stop reading my blog, call me an idiot, but at the end of the day it’s just MY blog, I can write whatever I want and people know that. When it’s a professional site (and business), they are held to a higher standard, a standard that was seriously compromised in this case, before, during, and after the review was published. That’s the issue.