It’s been my impression for a while that gaming critics overrated games at the high end. There’s also sometimes an impression in the gaming community that critics are shills. Statistically speaking though this doesn’t hold up to the evidence. Diablo 4 currently has a 90/100 on Open Critic. On closer examination it shows that this 90/100 is actually in the top 1% of ratings for games.
Now of course with a basic understanding of statistics you might expect this. But if you had the impression like me and a lot of the gaming community that there’s some score inflation at the top, it’s quite the opposite in a real world sense that 90/100 isn’t just in the top 10% of games but really in the top 1% so if you wanted the score to match the distribution it would be more of a 99 (and of course the games above that would be more like 99.89 etc).
Obviously our experiences are valid but this just shows we are more picky than we give ourselves credit for when it comes to gaming.
Critics aside, too many AAA games releasing these days are just a hot mess. They look and feel like they were launched several months ahead of their launch dates with no real QA or play testing done and no timelines for imminent bug fixes.
Diablo 4’s beta tests looked and felt better than some of the games that have come out during this time and they do deserve a significantly higher rating than those games as it is well earned.
I would argue that there should be even more separation and Diablo 4 should be further ahead because the critics are afraid to rate terrible games lower than a 6 or 7 out of 10. Even some of those 8’s are a solid 6 or 7 at best. I wish the critics had the balls to dump games that deserved to be dumped, but keep in mind that might also dump sponsor dollars.
Best thing you can do is gather information and footage from multiple sources and form your own opinion these days. Much of what you will find in the online realm is either pure hype or disingenuous.
this may be true but I think my point is that the critics aren’t inflating scores based on the reality of what the games are that exist. It may be the case that games in general just aren’t that good but this is based on a concept of what games should be as opposed to a relative rating comparing apples to apples
Ratings are inflated for sure. Bad games are 6 and good games are a 9. It’s like they should move to a 1-5 scale instead.
if I look at the distribution curve it seems like critics score game based on American school letter grade system. (this makes sense because a lot of critics will actually give B A scores). So in that system 7.5/10 is supposed to be average (the largest bars in the curve are all in the 7’s. But there’s a huge drop off at the high end and only 1% of games get a 9/10 which isn’t inflated at all.
(this all makes perfect sense to me as an American. if I was from a different country I might think that this system is bad, but when I see a 5/10 in general (movies games, anything ) it doesn’t mean “average” to me. it means bad
Might have seemed a lot better after playing the new LoTR game which is hot garbage lol.
I doubt many of them reached max level, but it’s still a good sign to see decently high scores.