RBRTMNZ

I would bet money that even though it reviewed as mid, a year from now there will be weirdos claiming it was snubbed from the Game Awards because it came out in December.

@Banjo- That's perfectly fine but there are better ways to handle that confusion. I don't go around calling all Asian people Chinese when I am unable to discern their ethnicity.

@fraserg How is reptillos comment still up? I come to this site for the well moderated community more than anything else. Allowing this type of pointless ***** comment does not make for a good well moderated community.

@Banjo- No, he implied that there is a problem with the protagonist being Latina and showed his ignorance by labeling this almost certainly not Mexican woman as Mexican.

@darkswabber My initial point was that games falling outside the top 40% percent of reviewed games are not great but to extend this to games scoring 5-6 meaning they’re not even in the top 50% of reviewed games, I don’t disagree, they might be good/average, but my point remains, there are literally thousands of games that review above good/average. With thousands of 7-10 games I’m probably only playing a 6 in some very rare cases like if it’s my favorite genre and I’ve already played everything better.

To put it in context, you’re right that Atomic Heart(56th percentile) is not bad, I played a couple of hours and it was fine, but I dropped off because like other games in its review range it has glaring weaknesses (combat, puzzles, dialogue) that make it clear there are hundreds of better games I could be playing. I would only play it if the setting had drawn me in more or if I was really into first person melee. It’s quality makes it niche and the scores reflect that.

Wo Long. It's ugly and the story is bad but the combat is so so so good. I thought Lies of P was the best soulsike this year but Wo Long had better combat.

@darkswabber Is a 70-75 great? Opencritic breaks the games into tiers. The top two tiers account for the best 40% of all games being reviewed and currently the dividing line for tier 3 is 74 so if a game receives a score below 74 it is at best a 59th percentile game which to me is not great. I have enjoyed games that have scored below 74 but I can always see the glaring issues keeping those games from being great.

I voted Remnant 2 but also wanted to shout out Thirsty Suitors. It’s a great little turn based rpg where the “combat” is in the form of emotional conversations in which your dialogue choices have a real impact on the battle and you need to listen to the opponent to figure out their weaknesses.

I'm 0/12 on the games I have my eye on going on sale. Hopefully Nintendo and Sony have better sales.

@iplaygamesnstuff So you believe the store you worked at sold spots on the best seller list so naturally everyone must do it? That’s a really big jump to your conclusion especially considering that the Game Awards has an independent voting process and almost certainly uses an independent third party to tabulate votes as all big awards shows do. Plus even your conclusion about your employer is probably wrong. A lot of products debut as best sellers thanks to pre-orders. A much easier conclusion would be that you have basic taste in media. I’m not saying that’s the case but it’s much less of a jump than you’re making.

@iplaygamesnstuff It sounds like you’re confusing popularity and sales for quality. Thing an are not popular because they’re good. They’re popular because of a combination of marketing and conforming to things that are already popular. That’s not to say popular things cannot still be good but when you make a product like that it’s nearly impossible to make something special that stands out or pushes the industry forward.

It's not a surprise at all that it wasn't nominated so why bring it up and give the haters one more chance to dunk on the game?

@Decimateh You compelled me to look through the ratings on the xbox store and you are right that exclusives do have a lot of bad reviews but after reading through them I still don't think they are review bombing.

I think it's more just the place people tend to express their frustration when an exclusive game doesn't work right. Metacritic review bombs tend to regurgitate bad faith talking points whereas a huge portion of the bad reviews on the xbox store are describing very specific technical issues. I would not personally give a game a 1/5 due to a technical issue but I also don't think it's illegitimate.

Additionally, whereas most 1 star reviews on other exclusives are almost entirely focused on technical issues, Starfield does have a lot of thoughtful 1 star reviews from people simply disappointed by the game. They're much more substantive and unique than typical review bombs and seem like criticisms from people who actually played.

And I am not saying review bombs do not happen when games hit Game Pass. I just thinks its more likely to happen to indie games like Thirsty Suitors with queer themes and interesting art. Rather than some concerted effort by weirdos who like xbox enough to spend money on owning one but somehow still hate it enough to waste their time review bombing.

@Decimateh I don't know about that man. It seems super unlikely that Xbox players review bombed an Xbox game. 3.4/5 is very high compared to my completely legitimate review.

Hi-Fi Rush was robbed

This is so hard for me to decide. It’s not my type of game but it’s supposed to be a masterpiece so why not? I’m concerned about console UI but people I trust love it. The world and lore look amazing but that’s true of Divinity 2 and I’ve owned that for years without bothering to play it.

@robe That's a good point. I'm not a big RPG person, and don't personally get much satisfaction from building up a character, so CaRPG mechanics might be especially lost on me while fun and enjoyable for others.

@robe People should be constantly complaining about the car leveling feature at every opportunity. I just did my first my first showcase which should be a big moment but a lot of the excitement is diminished by having to use basically the stock version of the car. This is the experience most people will have... driving stock versions of cars in career mode. It's silly that they were so dogmatic about "earned not bought" or whatever their dumb marketing phrase was.

@Fenbops I felt like they were much easier but they are not easy. Their attacks are super fast and relentless. It often felt like I was just trying to hang on as they did never ending combos with very small punish windows but they don't hit as hard as earlier bosses and seem to have less health.

One small caveat is that I understand these bosses to be especially hard for people who had been relying on dodging rather than parrying.

This game is amazing. I hope they drop some tough new bosses. After getting my ass kicked by the mid game bosses, I was a bit disappointed in the challenge of the bosses in chapter 11, though they were still super fun, so I am hoping they provide some final challenge bosses in DLC.

This is perfect for their hardcore fans who love to be dismissive of other games. As of now their fans can only arrogantly dismiss soulslikes as derivative and failing to match FS quality but in they future they will also get to be dismissive of new FS games and talk about how they prefer the games that came before FS watered down its staff.

FM has so many problems but I think the biggest issue is it’s just so bland. Nothing feels exciting. F1 which is a similarly dry racing game makes each race feel like an event thanks to the commentary and much better pre race shots of the track.

The game seems to be designed with online as the focus and single player being a place to grind out car levels so the majority of players will only ever get to experience sub-optimal vehicles. How did they miss the mark so badly?

I really hope we are nearing the end of companies chasing GaaS money.

@Dan1283 It's a bummer. I want to play more but don't want to have my experience tainted so I decided to delete it until they fix it. Playing games at launch is becoming an increasingly questionable decision.

I hope some of the upcoming content includes a game that doesn’t crash every time I try to play it.

What is even the point of a police sim if I cannot harass black men for fitting the description? That and stand and stare at their cell phone is like 98% of what cops do in my city.

@Balta666 I think the problem is less that they are tanky and more that the punish windows are almost always only long enough for a single attack. I normally play dex builds but switched to heavy for this because even with a light weapon it’s hard to get more than one hit in so the fights become slogs. I imagine even more so for you as the combat is predicated on staggering bosses via parrying.

@Balta666 I wish I had it in me to quit a tough game. The unrelenting difficulty of Lies of P bosses has sapped some fun out of the game but I'm just going to keep pushing that boulder up the hill. I don't normally have issues with souls games(beat Melania second try) but this game is hard AF for me.

@BBB That's interesting. I've fallen out of watching racing so I didn't consider that things might be handled differently these days. I think the inability to go door to door is the rub for me. It's weird that trading paint side by side gets penalized, especially during the initial ***** at the start of the race where I will often get sandwiched between two AI each trying to push my off the race line from either side.

@Titntin I think I figured out the issue with Forza AI. It seems like the cars just want to be magnetized to the ideal race line and will try to take it even if you're already occupying that space. They constantly force me off the track this way and then I get penalized with a 1 segment slowing the already frustratingly slow car progression.

@BBB I would argue that stock car racing, or at least NASCAR, which I grew up watching, is very much a contact sport. But this is just a different challenge and that’s fine.

I wish I could at least use a classic NASCAR technique of drafting into the car in front of me and pushing them forward so we could chase down the lead car, without being penalized CP, since Forza games always seem to handle difficulty by just making the first place car drive away from the pack so that when you clear the field they have an impossible to close lead.

@BBB The game seems to be really pushing clean racing which doesn't vibe with my rubbing is racing philosophy. It's fine, I also enjoy the challenge of keeping it completely clean but it is annoying to get a 1 segment score when the computer crashed into me.

@Mighty90 "I don't like these reviews about a video game, it must be because of those wokes." LOL what a silly way to process the world.

@Moonglow Why should it be on the consumer to slog through the boring part of the game and not on the developer introduce its story and systems in an entertaining manner? Tutorials and story setup don’t have to be boring and in many games they are exciting.

@OldGamer999 Sure options are great but I still don’t think it’s an attack on anyone’s preferences. I like the sort of game that Starfield is but some of their design choices turn me off so I just move on to games that give me what I want rather than being offended that it doesn’t cater to me.

@Romans12 I thought the demo was easier than most of Elden Ring. I think a lot of ER fans struggled with it because it’s asking you to parry rather than dodge. I saw a lot of ER streamers struggling because they kept trying to dodge exclusively even though the game seems to actively discourage dodging by making it as hard to use as parrying is in ER. I’m sure you could learn it if you wanted to.

@OldGamer999 I love when developers do this to gamers because I love the challenge. Why is them making a game for other people something for you to be upset about? Why can’t it just be okay that not every game is for everyone?

I definitely think this is the best year for games ever but it’s oddly a bit lost on me. FF16, Starfield, SF6, MK1, and BG3 are all not for me. Plus some games I anticipated ended up reviewing poorly for reasons I think would bother me if I tried them. As a result I loved 2022 way more than this year.

Hoping Mario, Alan Wake, lies of P, Ghostrunner, and Gunbrella turn the tide.

@Lightweight Is it possible that what you've identified is not hypocrisy and instead that there are hundreds of millions of gamers and some of them have opposing opinions?

Hell, I think it's even possible for the same person to completely reasonably think Redfall, primarily a shooter, is not okay at 30 fps but Starfield, primarily an immersive storytelling RPG is fine. For me personally Starfield at 30 fps was a deal breaker but 30 fps didn't impact my enjoyment of Zelda in the slightest. Different games and different people have different needs.

It’s a bummer that so few games have VRR implementation. It’s so good. Jedi Survivor ran so well with VRR that I wouldn’t have known it had performance issues if I had not read about it online.

@Tonmoy Yeah the thing about opinions is that they sometimes can contradict other peoples opinions. His tepid approval is just as valid as your glowing opinion. It would be absurd for anyone to accuse you of being a fanboy for enjoying the game just as it’s absurd to treat it like he was hating on the game when he was clearly just expressing some level of disappointment while still rating it as “good” and recommending the game.

@BBB Nice! I’m much more confident in my ability to win with a slightly suboptimal setup than I am in my ability and patience to personally optimize.

@Tonmoy The person who reviewed Starfield for IGN is a diehard Bethesda fan and even played Starfield in new game plus. I’m not sure what the issue is. He just didn’t love it. It’s an opinion and a well reasoned one if you read the article. Fair to disagree with their opinion but weird to consider it a problem based on not liking the score.

Trying to control my excitement. I love racing games but hate cars and have zero interest in learning to tune cars in a game so I’m hoping the RPG elements don’t require much mechanical knowledge.

6/10 - I gave it a go but the story and setting were not enough for me to put up with 30 fps shooting. You lose so much precision.

@Deljo That feels like a bad faith reply but I’ll take you seriously. Women account for 48% of Xbox owners vs 41% of ps owners. The average age of an Xbox owner is 33 vs 28 for ps. While the typical owner profile is the same across all consoles those are still significant enough margins to impact the tone of the communities.

@GrumpyDev You’re definitely right but there are degrees to this. Up until two years ago I had only ever had Nintendo consoles and decided it was time for an HD console. I didn’t have any prior allegiance but I ended up picking XBox because the PS community came across as incredibly toxic. I now own all three and frequent their communities across several websites and forums and still think PS is by far the most toxic. It makes sense when you consider that the PS audience is younger and skewed more towards men.

@evan23 It's crazy that RT was supposed to be a key feature of these consoles and now the only time I really ever hear about it is when it causes performance problems or is being used in very specific almost meaningless manner like looking at your cars in Forza. It's gorgeous but just doesn't work with the current console generation.

@lacerz Curious that you chose a bunch of mixed quotes and a quote about it being queer inclusive. It's almost as though you find inclusiveness to be a negative. Is that what you intended?

If you're upset about this you really need to take a look in the mirror and reconsider how you treat people. I am 100% confidant that I will never receive a strike.