Link to my comment from the other thread, this is probably a more fitting place anyway
Bang on dude, firing it up now.
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Could’ve used a litttle time in the oven in my opinion. The game is great and looks amazing, but the performance varies a lot.
Anyone playing solo? How is it?
I am playing solo so far and really loving it!
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I’m, half way through a solo run (already finished a co-op run) and I absolutely love it as much solo as co-op
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As much as I don’t want to drag myself into the ‘ratings’ debate…
The idea that a game is either a ‘masterpiece, excellent, good, or ok’ and there is no nuance between them is probably one of the literally most absurd things I’ve heard. And it applies across all art forms. There are masterpieces that transcend their genre, masterpieces within them, masterpieces in CERTAIN aspects, great things that fall short in one aspect, good things that are masterpieces in others…
The granularity of this is huge. I don’t really think you can take a piece of art and ‘rate it’. The idea of sticking a number on a film review is a bit odd and mostly doesn’t happen. The point is the review itself covers the huge granular detail that a score, no matter how its delivered cannot. Games are even more subject to granularity given they are often broken by modes, SP/MP etc etc…and therefore thinking you can just say ‘this is a masterpiece and this is just great’ is utterly bonkers.
The words of the review deliver the nuance, a score will never do that no matter how many numbers you use.
My point is about how many appreciable tiers of quality there are between a masterpiece on one hand, and a piece of hot garbage on the other.
The word ‘appreciable’ is important here. If there is not a noticeable drop in quality, you cannot drop a grade.
To go down appreciably from a Masterpiece, you have an excellent game. To go down appreciably from an excellent game you have a good game. Then an OK game. Then a sub par game. Then a bad game. Then a piece of hot trash.
You can arbitrarily stick the word ‘very’ before some tiers, or use synonyms, to bulk out the list further, but the levels of quality you are referring to are not appreciable from those already there.
I’m not saying how I think things should be, I am pointing out how they are.
How many years now have websites been banging their heads against the wall insisting: “hey guys check out our explainer – a 7 is actually a good game, a 5 is actually OK”?
It’s got them nowhere. Gamers see a 7 as OK and a 5 as hot trash. Retailers feel the same in their pockets from the game sales. So do publishers when deciding whether to grant a sequel. Even Sony reportedly runs an ‘8 or no sequel’ policy for their first party.
No one will ever listen to anyone insisting that a game that has dropped four whole appreciable tiers in quality from the best games is still good. Because it’s not. It can’t be. If it was it would have got one of the four grades above it.
It’s on the outlets to accept that. Not on their readers to agree to something illogical.
But tiers are a nonsense full stop and make no sense. They simply aren’t real things. A masterpiece isn’t a set thing. You can’t define it. You can’t say ‘this is it’. It just doesn’t work like that.
Which is why scores and tiers really aren’t appropriate. When you look at the top rated metacritic games of all time number 2 is THPS2. Are you saying genuinely that, THPS2 is for a majority of people the 2nd best game of all time? Its not. Not by a long way. And that’s why scores are completely misleading. It might be for some the best game of all time. And that’s why reviews and words are what matters. Not numbers and tiers. You can’t even compare THPS2 with GTA4 (next on the list and above GTAV) its a nonsense. What you can do is say that they are both superb examples of what they do. But that needs nuance and complexity not just a number. At least at the Oscars and TGA’s you’re comparing across particular categories. And that does make more sense. Best MP, best story etc…vs ‘we need to assign a number and tier to game X and Y’. Which makes no sense whatsoever. The Ascent is actually the perfect example - half the reviewers put it in masterpiece the rest in good and a few in ‘hot garbage’. You seriously see why numbers, tiers and the like fail.
That’s a valid opinion. There are sites that don’t use ratings, and that’s fine.
But if we are going to use ratings, then we should use a scale that makes sense.
If we’re going to use ratings and really my argument is we shouldn’t but IF we are then we need as much granularity as possible. And ideally not a single number. A broad range of categories could be rated - like the rtings TV ratings - because at least then you can decide what matters to you and what doesn’t.
I disagree there. The words of the review are there to provide the necessary nuance. The rating is just to say what recognisable tier of quality the reviewer thinks the game is in.
And my opinion is, there are basically seven recognisable tiers of quality, with Masterpiece at the top and Unacceptable at the bottom.
Between those seven grades, the difference is too small to merit it’s own grade, and the reader should refer to the words of the review for more detail.
Still on about this eh? 1-10 makes a lot of sense, it is instantly recognizable as it is used in percentages (5 is 50%), metrics measurements and weights etc. The problem isn’t that people don’t understand a 1-10 scale, it is that the outlets doesn’t use it properly. A 7 isn’t considered “meh” by a lot of people because they don’t understand, it’s because many sites doesn’t use the full scale and/or give too high grades to too many games which waters it down over time.
If the reviewers were better at scoring along the full scale we would not have an issue.
Also this thing with counting down is just silly. You judge a game on its merits not what you want to deduct points for. Games don’t start out a 10 and then you subtract points, what kind of weird shit is that?
For the sake of the discussion I would also like to add that I prefer non numbered scoring. Like a simple recommend or not. ACG’s “buy - wait for sale - never touch” is nice too. With Game Pass reviews are moot anyway, but for games not on there it’s good to read/watch the actual reviews, scoring games is kinda stupid.
Wait a minute…you beat the game already???
Probably did a co-op run with Jesse who got the review copy.
Okay, that would explain it.
Haha, I’d stopped but someone else addressed me on it. I’ve made my point so still stop talking about it when others stop asking me about it. 
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Yeah, that
I was lucky enough to have been playing it since Saturday. We finished our CO-OP run by Monday and I was playing solo whenever I wasn’t playing with him. So that’s how I know how far in to it my solo run is
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But to reply to your point, again – we are talking about what a recognisable tier of quality is.
Mario 64, Red Dead Redemption, Celeste, Breath of the Wild, MS Flight Sim – these are all games that plenty of outlets gave 10/10 to. I’m happy to go along with them all as 10s.
But I don’t like them all equally. I could rank them, and I’m sure you could, from most to least favourite. But I can do that while accepting they all sit in the same tier.
So to move from that tier to the next, we need an appreciable difference in quality.
In fact, we need an appreciable difference in quality between every tier, otherwise why would a game not have had the higher number?
And if we apply that appreciable difference in quality down from 10 to 9, then 9-8, then 8-7 – you’re at an ‘OK’ game.
If you’re not, then the tiers did not have an appreciable difference in quality between them.
Lets look at IGN’s ten point scale for an example of the desperation outlets go to in order to fill ten tiers:
10: Masterpiece. All good.
9: Amazing: Fine.
8: Great. That’s a synonym for amazing. And if a game is a recognisable tier down from amazing, it’s good, not great.
7: Good: belongs one higher. If the above is good, a tier down is OK.
6: OK: a game that has dropped four tiers from the best is not OK. It’s substandard.
5: Mediocre: Means the same thing as OK. They just wanted something saying ‘average’ to be in the middle so they repeated themselves.
4: Bad: they kind of skipped over sub par and the tier above is actually bad. The idea that a game five recognisable tiers down from the best is anything but bad is absurd.
3: Awful. It’s awful that this list is still going on.
2: Painful. A painfully tenuous synonym for awful that they have to use as there are two tiers left.
1: Unbearable. I’m sure it was unbearable for whoever had to write this to think of this many ways to say ‘it’s a dumpster fire, don’t buy it’.
Clearly too many tiers.
Maybe we need to standardize a formula to convert these scales to something that’s not mostly useless… Any mathematicians in here?