As part of a QuakeCon panel called ‘Building Blockbusters,’ Respawn Entertainment’s Vince Zampella spoke about his intense frustrations with reviewers who had not finished the games they were writing about. He shared the panel with id Software’s Tim Willits, Bethesda’s Todd Howard, and fellow Respawn founder Jason West.
"I've seen reviews where people have written things about the game that are untrue - like that feature doesn't exist, so they obviously didn't play through the entire game," Zampella said to the audience. "There's nothing more frustrating than that. It's unfair."
Todd Howard chimed in and said he felt games journalism was improving as the industry grew, and every panelist agreed that a well-informed review was best for the industry.
"There's other reviews where they were critical on a few things and they were probably right, they called it, okay - and you can live with that. And there are some that are just glowing and you eat those up," Zampella said.
"Reviews. Yeah, that's a tough one," said Jason West about the drawbacks to glowing reviews. "You want to believe the good ones."
"You want informed reviews. You can tell when someone has played your game and when it was an assignment to get the paycheck,” added Howard. "If I'm going to play Modern Warfare multiplayer, I know that I'm in for 50 hours, so they do a lot of research, so when the research is a review where some guy didn't spend a lot of time playing your game, that's crushing.”
"But if they're going to give you criticism and they've obviously played the game and thought about it, which we all get, it's actually helpful."
Near the end of the panel, West spoke about review scores. "I'll put in a small pitch for what I think would be a better system of metrics, but it will never happen because people love numbers," he said. "The way Rotten Tomatoes works for movies I think is a lot more accurate reflection of positive or negative, versus 92, versus 91.3, and they all get averaged out and it's pretty random."
Neither West nor Zampella spoke about their new project for EA, or their break with Activision, but said they were looking into technology for the new game at the moment. When asked about the Call of Duty yearly franchise handoff between Infinity Ward and Treyarch, West feigned mock sadness at the entire affair.
[Via Eurogamer]
