More Critics, Fewer ReviewersGears of War 3 is out, and it kicks off the 2011 holiday season of blockbusters with aplomb. All indications are that the game has been embraced by consumers. What's more, it's reached the golden standard of critical averages: over 90%.
You'd think that would be enough for Epic's Cliff Bleszinski to be happy, or at least content that the series has maintained roughly the same level of quality while increasing their sales with every incarnation and moving 3 million copies in the first week. That is not how the man formerly known as CliffyB is reacting. The exact words from Bleszinski on the first round of reviews for the game were: “Doing great, apart from a couple of haters.”
Haters. A slang term implying heavy prejudice from some other party on the speaker and typically used in a dismissive fashion. Multiple reviewers spent dozens of hours playing Gears of War 3 and wrote thousands of words on their opinion about the game and it gets boiled down to haters.
Anyway...
After referring to Eurogamer's review specifically (and Cliff, if you're reading this somehow, I want to tell you that the journalists at Eurogamer bare you no malice whatever you might think) he was asked what their problem with the game was. “You know, I didn’t quite gather it,” he responded. “I don’t want to come across as defensive. How do I phrase this properly? When people rated Gears 2 higher than Gears 3, it kind of upset me because I know Gears 3 is a better game on every level.”
"More critics would be a sign of maturation for not just the journo side of the business but the whole business."
I'm not condemning Bleszinski for his words, in the least because I know what it's like to have something you created be criticized – I'm not sure that ever gets comfortable. He's obviously passionate about what he does, taking to the Internet to defend the Gears of War 3 story: I cannot imagine a more futile task, but at least he cares. I would like to add the fact that Bleszinski is one of the more amusingly outspoken people in the industry and I've always been entertained by what he has to say, if not informed. However, it's disappointing to hear this sort of of talk for both the media and the whole industry.
Jim Sterling already did a great piece talking about this very subject. He was one of the persons that filed one of the “controversial” eight-out-of-ten reviews, and found himself dealing with criticism over the review score (not the review itself, just the score). He noted that the piling on came not only from Joe Graf, also of Epic Games, but also other game developers and members of the the media. Sterling emphasized that the greatest irony is that he regards Gears of War 3 as a “great game” but that his criticism of the game was apparently too harsh as evidenced by the score.
But lets put these complaints in context. What exactly is this whole discussion over in an objective sense? Looking on Metacritic and GameRankings we can examine the diminishing returns for the Gears franchise. The current averages on GameRankings for the Gears of War trilogy on Xbox 360 are 93.89%, 93.32%, and 91.43% from the first to the third game; Metacritic scores for the games are 94, 93 and 91. Yes, what we are fundamentally having an argument about here is a couple of points difference.
Despite this, on a certain level, I think I know what Bleszinski is complaining about besides raw review scores. Gaming is its own sort of craft, there's an engineering to it. Fundamentals can be refined: animation, gameplay, balance, all those sorts of things. Given the extra time that Epic Games was given to tighten things up, everything that I've read and seen about Gears of War 3 suggests that it is, in the least, the most polished Gears of War product at launch ever.
So I get the fact that Gears of War 3 is, on some fundamental gameplay level, probably better compared to the first two games. However, the rub for many game reviews is the clause of originality or innovation. This starts to bite into games when they have sequel numbers over two – unless the gameplay is torn down and rebuilt, it's only going to be a variation on what's come before, however good that might be. God of War 3 also got dinged for that – it was one of the best games I played in 2010, but it was certainly an experience derivative of what came before it and depending on who you are, that might be a big deal.
The system for reviews is what it is and it's not going away anytime soon. I know a lot of readers like precise scores even as a lot of reviewers hate them, but it's almost certainly a obligation that will continue for the foreseeable future. There's just a critical mass that reviews have reached as far as their importance to the industry, it's almost crazy: some developers are pressured to meet certain Metacritic scores. At the same time, I feel like there's also a need for more game critics – something distinct from reviewers. While reviewers have an obligation to evaluate a game based upon its appeal to consumers and its value as a retail product, critics look at the product as a work of creative expression and determine its worth in more subjective ways.
When I think of game critics, the first person that comes to mind is Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw. The rambling British critic has been unapologetically skewering games for over four years in his Zero Punctuation videos. He lays out his biases and isn't afraid to call a spade a spade and at the end of the day, there's no score at all. He entertains in his critiques, but he also tries to bring up points of contention in a way that can be a learning moment for developers everywhere. While I find myself agreeing with him more often than not, ultimately his opinion is just that.
Many gamers have serious problems with accepting differing opinions about games, and I think it originates from the “objective” measures of many reviews: graphics, sound, gameplay, etc. I feel like if there were more critics judging games on their own scale (like Yahtzee, Kotaku and others) rather than plugging numbers into a review equation to get a final score, there would be fewer of these arguments.
Similar to movie critics, it could be beneficial if more game reviews boiled down to a thumbs up or a thumbs down scale. Perhaps that would force more people to actually read the content of the review rather than just skip down to the score at the end! More critics would be a sign of maturation for not just the journo side of the business but the whole business; after all, you would never hear Christopher Nolan complain that 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes is unacceptable for The Dark Knight – why should it be different with games?
