Fucking finally. I love a funny joke but if you’re looking for serious reviews, you currently have to wade through a sea of trolls, jokes and copy-pasted meme reviews in order to figure out if a game is interesting to you.
Community features are cool but if you’re the most popular platform of your kind, you’re gonna attract a lot of trolls who’s content can be really out there. Filters are a good solution to this!
Better than sex
- the most genius comedian of all time
Nobody will read this so I’ll just say it: I’m gay.
A lot of them aren’t even about the game at all…
And people explaining what the game is instead of how the game is.
A review should tell you what the game is. It should also tell you what they like/don’t like about it, but different perspectives about how the core mechanics work are absolutely critical parts of the discussion.
different perspectives about how the core mechanics work
As you said, how they work. The description already tells me what the game is and I don’t need a review reciting it a la “Shadow warrior is an action adventure fps game where you play as a ninja fighting against demons”
Descriptions are useless horseshit.
A review that doesn’t mention what the actual gameplay loop is is a bad review.
To further flesh out your comment:
I recently played a small game called “Ever Forward” on the Nintendo switch. Nowhere it says that the game runs like a PowerPoint presentation. Other than that, it would be helpful if I would have read a review that said “the beautiful world you see in the trailer and screenshots is the ‘hub’ where you enter boring looking levels. The puzzles consist of 2-3 cameras that react to sound and a cube you can throw and that you need to carry to the end of each short puzzle.”
Indeed, sometimes I really appreciate a heads up of if I can save in the middle of gameplay or if I have to complete a whole run before it saves progress, things like that are not deal breakers but it can definitely affect how I play a game
There’s stuff like that, but it’s also as simple as most game pages just not accurately depicting what the core gameplay loop is. The number of games with 10 cinematic trailers that combine for 3 seconds of gameplay and have descriptions full of setting with maybe some features but don’t mention whether they’re a card game or an FPS is way too high.
Screenshots can probably resolve my example, and tags are “OK”, but marketing trash is just so abundant that a lot of pages are genuinely hard to figure out pretty basic elements of what the minute to minute experience is.
God I hate cinematic trailers for unreleased games. It’s fine if it’s a released game that I can just Google gameplay.
I straight up am not interested in them at all.
There are some games where I become attached to the writing, even though most are pretty mediocre and it’s not why I play games. But I’ve never once had a story trailer interest me in any way. I will play the game if the mechanics are compelling, regardless of story. If they aren’t, the story isn’t better than a book or TV show and I don’t care.
It’s super annoying when even the screenshots are cinematic nonsense. It’s a game. I want to know what the game is.
Sometimes the game itself doesn’t really tell you what it is. That’s not completely shocking.
I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.
It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.
But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.
Some review bombs are for legit reasons. I’ve seen a few for games that dropped support for a language well after release.
Is it even review bombing if it’s for a legit issue with the game in question?
In my opinion, the question comes down to “what is a valid criticism”. I think the bombing part, where a lot of people give a similar negative review at the same time is secondary.
If a game releases in a borderline unplayable state this warrants negative reviews. It shouldn’t matter how many of them there are and if they are all in a similar time frame. Same with an update that harms the game a lot. If this makes the game change the rating from positive to mixed or negative, I think that’s fair because if I buy the game now, I will get it in the most recent state and if this is shit I don’t care if it was better at some point in the past, I’m glad if I get a warning through the reviews.
If the game gets negative reviews because a person/group related to creating the game said or did something that a large group of people disagree with it’s more complicated. It boils down to if you can/want to separate the art from the artist and if you find that criticized thing bad in the first place. If you don’t think this is a valid criticism you probably think this “review bombing” is a bad thing.
I think the term “review bombing” is used to imply that the criticism has nothing to do with the game itself. But like with all terms, the usage becomes broader and broader until it changes or loses meaning completely.
Since Steam reviews contain written explanations it is easy to check why the game gets the negative attention. I never came across a game that had a lot of reviews for an unrelated thing where almost all the negative reviews lied and said it was bad for gameplay reasons.
I don’t have a direct quote, but I remember reading a few years ago that valve was debating how to handle bombing. They said something along the lines of not wanting to silence the bombers, but to highlight it so it was clear it was a review bomb. I got the impression they were considering things like showing the unusual spike of reviews in a different color. This sounds like it might be the results of that.
They already have something for it, when I look at a review bombed game it specifically tells me that theres been unusual activity with the reviews. I believe you cna choose to hide or show the review bombs in the settings somewhere.
Ah got it. I didn’t realize. That sounds exactly like what I remember.
I’ve never discovered review bombing over steam. Either my peers mention it to me or I see it on social media.
Though to be fair, almost all of my decisions about buying games are made from watching videos of said game, rather than reading reviews. Steam reviews, for me, are either for very cheap games I’m buying impulsively or games where I have some insight but am still on the fence.
I used to read Rock Paper Shotgun as part of the decision making process, but I’ve found their input less useful the last few years.
Take a look at games like Gta5 when Take2 tried to ban modding (lol).
If I’m grokking the feature correctly, people will have to review bomb the review bombers with “unhelpful” flags.
This is a good change, they have had the unhelpful/helpful/funny review system for years now, but I always found it weird it didn’t do anything aside from boost on “helpful” rating. something that is majority unhelpful rated shouldn’t be shown on the review page or arguably in the score in the first place.
Speaking of unhelpful, eurogamer.net is littered with ads. They add no value to the original Reddit post (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1emb4ch/valve_is_finally_addressing_bad_reviews_issue/).
Really good change. Filtering out “funny” reviews are what everyone’s thinking of, but I hope this also gets rid of those dumb reviews where people just fill out a long form rating everything 10/10 just because they like the game.
How I feel about your comment: 1 - it’s ugly 2 - meh 3 - the graphics are okay 4 - it’s pretty 5 - OMG it’s like real life!
5/5
For every like I will eat a spoonful of salt
Who will review the reviewer?
Please just give us a “maybe”
I do enjoy a sprinkling of meme and unhinged reviews - especially as part of Northernlion Reads Hentai Game Steam Reviews segments - but overall this is probably a change for the better.
Should probably just filter them out by default, and then have a sort by funny or something.
Are ya winning, son?
Surprised steam would do something like this. Must of snuck it past Lord GabeN
“unhelpful” review aka reviews that could make them earn less money.
What? You think they should run the platform out of the kindness of their hearts?
Why not? Don’t people play games because they want to have fun?
The instance and platform you are using to comment isn’t a corporation grinding billions.
