On Metacritic the professional reviews are all very good 88% average from 29 reviews.
The players scores are much lower over 1000 reviews and 55% average. There are a mix of very good reviews and very bad reviews.
Whats causing this big disconnect from player perception to professional game reviewers? 30% delta is pretty huge.
While 55% isn’t terrible - I mean its a pass it also isnt great for a game thats been in development for so long. The good news is 55% also means the bones of the game are there and it probably wouldnt be too difficult to improve the game and get it to 75%.
88% to me implies a very top end game.
But im still shocked by the massive variance between pro reviewers and regular gamers
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Inb4 “review bombing justifies all” posts.
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Loud minority tanking reviews.
The vast majority is chilling and enjoying D4.
Official reviews are right.
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I would also add, professional reviews from critics, generally play a demo of the game.
So they only play a small scope of what the game truly entails from start to finish.
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First off, there are… well a lot of problems with video game critics, but for our purposes two things jump out here. One, that they tend to have limited time and information to review the game (it’s often done with only a few days of access before everyone else), and second that who reviews a game varies depending on the popularity of it.
In practice this means that AAA games (which can provide a much better initial impression and tend to have more groups that want to get review access) and games which are heavy on end game systems (such as ARPGs) tend to have reviews that often don’t reflect their end game experience.
In plain terms, I wouldn’t much trust critic reviews on a major game. Honestly I wouldn’t trust user reviews either, but they can tell you whether or not the user base is angry.
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- Excellent first impression.
- Not so good experience after campaign.
- Longtime series fans which were disappointed with D3 feel disappointed again after a long wait and 20 years after D2, so become angry.
Professional reviews fall in the first point, (obv not all) players fall in 2nd and 3rd.
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most “professional” reviewers probably didn’t make it to the end game grind, I think most just either play the demo or stop after main story.
The games flaws start to get pointed out around level 70-80ish. Yes it could be tanking reviews, but I wouldn’t say it’s an 88% game either. With QoL things like gem storage being put on the backburner for 4 months, kind of bothers some people.
I’d rate it a 70% atm personally, it has a lot of room to grow, but it has a lot of flaws too but the Devs are putting in work to get things done and todays patch was a great step forward.
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Yeah, and beta tests reaction vs full game release reaction are a similar approach: there wasn’t this negativity during beta, everything changed when the game fully released.
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Reviewers played the game only for the brief period where it really is a cool fun game and everything is new and easy.
Customers, are, well, customers.
For many in our current world, if you were expecting “awesome” and instead got “just OK” that results in a 0.0 ragefest review lol.
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Its because “professional reviews” are people who played through the campaign and thats it most likely. Which for a casual one playthrough it does its job.
The players however continue to play into the endgame which shows the huge flaws along with the aspect of rerolling (Once for each character for Eternal players and every 3 months for seasonal players) which leads to the negative reviews.
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Professional reviewers don’t play endgame, they play the campaign, probably only act 1 in many cases.
The campaign is honestly great and most builds work fine. The problems don’t arise until WT4, but reviewers aren’t playing that long.
If you play this game like a single player campaign and stop after killing Lilith it’s a great experience. It’s clear they put no thought into anything after that though. So gamers see the problems and give it more bad reviews after hitting WT4 and seeing how empty the endgame is.
Add to this that all corporate media is governed by access also, so if they don’t give a good review they won’t get as much access to betas, special events, release parties, etc. companies have ways to incentivize good reviews and punish outlets that don’t play along.
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70% is probably where I would rank it as well with opportunity for higher ranking as features are added.
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No— the game, as a stand-alone game, is a 6/10 at best or a 7/10 if you have low standards. Pretty graphics doesn’t change that.
As a Diablo game, it’s 3/10, which is about the same as Diablo 3, as you can barely call these arcade games “Diablo”.
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Between streamers slamming the game, the forums, the Betas, the fireside chat issue, & the need for a 13 page patch all hint at something different.
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Nah, your emotions dont equal reality.
Sorry bub.
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“Professional” reviews are in no way professional.
Because reviews are bought and paid for. Only reason this game even that good with players is because so many not experienced the lack of ANYTHING after level 70.
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Great post. There are two things that we should not trust official or “professional” reviewers. First, they have limited time and sometimes limited experience in a genre (they play a variety but not that deep). Second, many of them are paid. If they are being very honest and wrote something bad about a game, next time they may not be sent a copy for review.
User reviews, if there are a large number of them, at least tell you the sentiments of the players and it’s easier to find both hateful and constructive comments.
You will have to filter information and apply your judgment. But if you ask me, a game with such a stark difference in overall scores mean some big corp cannot buy every reviewers.
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Professional reviews pretty much always give a significantly higher rating than player reviews.
Curious, isn’t it?
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Very, very curious and I’m surprised OP created a post for it. Glad that he got some pointers now in 2023 lol.
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