Not sure what happened but the Metacritic User Score plummeted to 5.2 following a wave of deleted user ratings. Over 200 user ratings were deleted.
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Not sure what happened but the Metacritic User Score plummeted to 5.2 following a wave of deleted user ratings. Over 200 user ratings were deleted.
I'm not one to trust anything from Metacritic in either direction, but something to keep in mind (that journalists don't want to talk about) is that review bombing goes both ways. Depending on the product, there will be corporate simps and paid shills that will influence votes. This is why I generally stick to sites where you can't leave a review unless you actually purchased the product. Those types of reviews can still be manipulated, but to less of a degree, and that manipulation will usually drop inversely with the price of the product.
There is a phrase that gets tossed around .. it goes something like this.. "subvert our expectations".
What does it mean to subvert something?
1. : to overturn or overthrow from the foundation : ruin. 2. : to pervert or corrupt by an undermining of morals, allegiance, or faith.
"Professional" review sites and their ilk love to use that phrase, like recently Astrobots got review bombed by a Marxist reviewer and they said it was a good game and fun but it was "soulless sony and failed to subvert their expectations" so they gave it a negative review. For the record it is like the 2nd highest selling game in the US in its launch week. Bad review? Yes. Bad reviewer? Well i dont want to subvert someones opinion, but the information is out there.
I think people don't really want to play a frickin video game to jave their views subverted or distorted in a social engineering kind of way. I wont lie, after a period of time playing Dawntrail I realized it was slopped and skipped every cutscene I could up until Shaaloani, on the first character i ran on. That is a first for me, I never skip cutscenes on a first run through but it was just so bad. And I wasnt even bothered by the politics, va (I didnt even know or care and still dont that wuk had a trans va, more power to them for landing a cool job), or any of that. I genuinely felt like Dawntrail did not just "not live up to the audience's high expectations" but it failed misreably at an attempt to subvert my expectations. Danwtrail MSQ sucked. Bad. And I do not begrudge anyone that liked it but I will not tolerate people being beligerent because I reviewed it negatively. A good example of a fun game, that I know what I am getting into when I play it, that doesn't social engineer me and I genuinely feel good about playing is Shining Force for the Sega Genesis, or Mega Drive. It is older than a lot of people that have spoken about this game or Dawntrail. It came from a different time and place. To take a phrase from a old Hollywood movie.. "a more elegant weapon, for a more refined era".
Stop trying to subvert me. Im pretty grounded in what I do, think and believe. And that is not a game developer or a game consultant or a game reviewer's business.
Score Update: More Metacritic User Ratings were deleted and the current User Rating rose to 5.3. Steam reviews in the last 30 days fell to 38% (Mostly Negative).