A letter to Square

[Abriael]

Oddly enough though, I still didn't hate my time playing FF13, and I never felt that I had to beat the game just to see the ending; I kept playing it because I was enjoying myself. Still not really sure why though.

Permit me to hazard a hypothesis: That's because the game was a pretty good game.

The main problem is that a few factors turned judging games into a matter of black and white, awesome or completely crappy.

Nowadays either a game is exceptional, or if it's just "pretty good" you'll see (at least on the internet) armies of people bashing it into the ground like it's the worst blight upon Earth, especially if it's part of a popular franchise.

If a game gets a 7 or even a 8 (especially if it's a popular franchise, again), it's considered an utter failure, instead of a "pretty good" or even good (in the case of the 8) game.

Nowadays if a studio makes a game that ranks under 8 on metacritic there are high chances that it will held against them by publishers the next time they pitch a game project.

Why is that? several factors. A main one is the internet (try doing your observation on this, and I'm quite sure you'll discover that this doesn't really happen between gamers that don't roam around the internet much or at all).

And within the internet there are two main factors: Press and discussion environments.

Discussion environments like newsgroup first (but at that time they were still small) and forums after contributed a lot in polarizing opinions between "awesome" and "completely crap", because in written discussion hyperbolic and extreme opinions simply are more effective to attract attention on one's position, giving people the impression that they're winning a discussion just by shouting louder than the opposition. In internet forums you'll very often see positions so extreme that if you just sit back and think about it, you'll wonder what the person smoked to get there, but it's very easy to be dragged into it instead.

The internet gaming press is another major culprit. Printed press is a lot less competitive that the internet. Magazines can keep argument more balanced because they don't need to resort to big headlines in order to "sell". Once the reader gets to the headlines he already bought his copy, so the selling point of game magazines is entirely different.

On the other hand the internet press relies a lot on extremes and hyperbole in order to attract readers. An over exaggerated tabloid-like headline or a polarized (either very high or very low) review score will simply draw more clicks on an article than a balanced one.

And on the internet "hits" are money. Straight and direct conversion. The more pageviews you get, the more impressions your ads get, the more you can get higher paying ads.

Of course (unless someone stoops so low as to write misleading headlines, and it happens) the body or the article needs to reflect the headline, so you see a ton of attention grabbing extremized articles. Check places that aggregate articles and rank them by "Hotness" like N4G.com and you'll notice this trend very easily.

Extremized and controversial wins and balanced loses.

Add to that the fact that the internet press often houses a lot of people with absolutely no journalistic background, to which no one even went near to teach the idea of journalistic integrity, and you get the full picture.

As in every environment there are opinion leaders, and when the opinion leaders polarize their opinions, and turn the place into a cesspit of negativity, hate, rage and fanboyism, a large part of the rest will inevitably follow.

(which is, mind you, another large difference between today and the game industry crash. Invalidating the video posted a few pages back further. At that time there was no internet making things look a lot worse than they are)

So yeah. Final Fantasy XIII is (in my opinion) actually a pretty good game. It's production values are exceptionally high and it has quite a lot of likable elements. It's also (again, in my opinion) not an exceptional game.

But telling what a blight on earth it is, and how it's a "slap in the face of the fans" will allow people to feel that they're shouting louder (and more effectively) during their beloved forum discussion.

Just like, if you're a journalist on the internet, giving it a 4 (without even getting anywhere near to finishing it, and I won't name names) gets you a lot more attention than giving it the 7.5-8 it (IMHO) deserves. Especially if it gives you a chance to bash a large and popular franchise or a large publisher like Square Enix. Shouting "the king is dead!" turns a lot of eyes.

Its metacritic score sits at a quite nice 83 (with a still very decent 7.9 user score) yet what are the reviews many remember? the 4s and 5s. What are the opinions many remember? The extremely negative ones on forums and on websites/blogs

Are those artfully (or often not even intentionally) polarized opinions a realistic expression of the actual quality of the game? Not a chance in hell.