With recent big game releases, it’s become obvious that a game is either a resounding success, or complete shit. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground.
Kingdom Come Deliverance II is a ambitious masterpiece, and Avowed is lazy slop. 93% of Steam users recommend KCD2, vs 77% for Avowed.
And maybe this has been an issue for a long time, fed by the need to get viewer numbers on articles and videos, leading to more polarized opinions that give people a reason to pick a side, even if they’re never going to play the game.
But as regular people, gamers, Lemmy posters, why are we doing the same? How is it serving us? Are we all influencers in waiting, hoping to up our updoot count and build a following of… dozens?
More than 2/3rds of players of Dragon Age Veilguard recommend the game on Steam. And yet reading the comments here and other places, you’d think that 90% of people who tried the game found it to be, not just bad, but absolute trash, with a small number of people chiming in that they actually enjoyed it.
And game studios are reacting much the same way, and are quick to start layoffs, or shut down all together.
But hey, we don’t owe those corporations anything. But, as a community, do we owe it to each other to foster more honest correspondence?
I don’t think this is a gaming problem.
It is a discourse problem.
People engage in absolutes. They either love a thing or hate a thing. There’s no nuance.
And it must be made to cater for them, there’s no expectation that it will contain choices they don’t approve of.
And this stance, this modern relationship with the world permeates everything, especially forms of media.
You see it in films and books… Fans and stans and folk trying to take it down. There is no nuance or middle ground.
People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”. That’s why you get grown men complaining about the direction of children’s shows they used to watch.
And this is compounded with social media where polarisation, blunt takes and contradiction are the primary drivers of engagement.
Audience error.
People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”
I think this is my favorite comment on this whole thread.
I’ll be honest, I downloaded Avowed through gamepass and couldn’t stand it for more than 4 hours.
It’s about as dull as a game can be and doesn’t excel at anything, even when compared to games that released 15 years ago.
Do I think it’s garbage? No, but I also would not recommend it to anyone, it’s not worth their time nor money.
People generally don’t talk too much about things that don’t particularly stand out. If a game is bad, people will complain. If a game is good, people will praise it. If a game is middling, most people will just move on. Nobody’s going to start a discussion about a game that was vaguely enjoyable but not noteworthy, unless expectations were unreasonably high to begin with.
People are more likely to go online and complain than to compliment. But why take internet comments so seriously. I have a handful of trusted sources that I use to get my opinions on games. DLC Podcast for example is a favorite of mine. I’ve gotten to know their tastes and where they overlap with mine so when they get excited about a specific thing I’ll know if I’m likely to enjoy it based on our shared interests.
When you get a handful of voices that have a strong overlap with your own taste then you can get outside of the tribalistic bitching of the hive. Comments don’t even concern me anymore.
Good ole Jeff Cannata!
Yup! Also the other host Christian appeals to the Sega kid in me. He’ll uncover gems that evoke the Dreamcast era.
We do have a problem of polarisation. But on the other hand we also have a problem of too many games, so we simply can’t play them all. This leads us to a need to choose which one to pick. And a bad choice is very bad, because games are expensive and time consuming.
Now the real problem is when a community mistaken a new game for another. Like avowed was considered a terrible game because the leader scroll fanboys thought it would be their next game, and it wasn’t. Anyone who know what old school bioware games were will certainly love avowed.
Now while veilgard is not a bad game, is it actually good? I’m not informed enough yet about it, but bioware has been terrible in the last decade, so I am clearly very wary of what they’re doing.
I will wait for a discount for both those games, and I’ll play avowed first because I’m informed and careful, and I have other games to play already.
On the side there’s also the problem of fascist propaganda that will brand a game woke a try to destroy it.
With the amount of 9s and 10s coming out, why would you waste time with a 7? The polarisation is just an effect of the language of clickbait spreading in society, but doesn’t change the fact that average games are probably not worth your time.
With recent big game releases, it’s become obvious that a game is either a resounding success, or complete shit. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground.
You’re saying this from a player opinion perspective which is accurate, but it’s also interesting that companies act the same way. If a big game doesn’t make 10 zillion dollars now there’s a good chance the entire company gets shut down.
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Well… to me this seems awfully close to “stop hitting yourself problem”.
Why are you looking comments everywhere? Do you really need that information to make a decision? Is it so bad to play a bad game now and then? I don’t see a problem, because this problem is easily avoidable by not going to social media for opinions.
Or am I missing the point?
The only problem is that people are idiots, especially online. Go to any comment section and you’ll find people angry at the content, no matter what the content is. And you’re taking them seriously, for some reason. Laugh at them and move on, no more polarization problem. As you’ve said, 77% of people enjoyed avowed. Probably even more, as people are a lot more likely to leave a bad review than a good one.
