Comic for Wednesday 11/23 (Early High Res)
Disclosure #1- Darktide was at "mixed" when I started the comic, and "mostly positive" by the time I finished it.
Disclosure #2- I am having a blast with Darktide, despite the server problems.
So. Darktide launches on November 30th, but they let people who preordered start early to help do some final testing/stressing of the servers. Pretty straightforward.
And, sure enough, there have been some issues. Disconnects, trouble joining, getting kicked from games, etc. It immediately started getting slammed with negative reviews from people struggling to play, which in turn ignited a rather interesting conversation that I can see both sides of. Should the game get review bombed for struggling during a beta test? Since you're paying for access to the beta period, are you entitled to expect a flawless experience? Or by knowing it was a beta when you pre-ordered, did you enter into an unspoken agreement to be a tester for an unstable product, and your money is only for the finished launch product?
On the one hand, if a product is unfinished, it does feel unfair to pass judgement on it, especially when so often reviews are "final" (ie, people rarely go back and edit them with new information/impressions).
I, certainly, would hate to have a comic I'm working on judged while it is still in the early sketch phase. And if, for instance, I showed it to someone to get feedback in the process, and they turned around and wrote a review that said "tomorrow's comic sucks" based on an incomplete product, that would be pretty frustrating.
On the flip side, I believe consumers have a right to as much information as possible regarding a potential purchase. So in that regard, someone contemplating pre-ordering Darktide should know the pre-order beta is currently working through some server/optimization stuff.
But where is the line (is there one)? Should a game have its perception/review ratio affected due to problems in a testing period that is specifically there to catch and fix said problems? When is it too early to review a game?
Forced to choose, I would err on the side of transparency for the consumer. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what stage a game needs to be at for it to be "reviewable"? Especially when these days people often use negative reviews as a weapon to vent their frustrations.
Comments (9)
The idea of 'warning others it's not ready yet' is the part where they labeled it a beta. That said, people can have whatever opinions they want at any time they want. That's the stronger argument imo
Tim, I think you've really hit at the core of the problem here, which is that the current system mostly relies on: 1) People not being a dick and review bombing for things that can be addressed or for finding problemes in a beta that is meant to find those types of issues. 2) Future consumers looking at the individual reviews for something and basing their decision on the details and not the generalized score. Recent review vs overall reviews somewhat help problem 2, but problem 1 is the real tough one to solve. I agree with you on airing on the side of transparency, which I think is always the better route as it keeps companies honest, but it's one thing to include comments about problems that can be fixed, and a whole other problem to base a review score on pre-launch server connection issues during a beta explicitly for the purpose of stress testing.
I'm in the 2 type of general problems camp. Core problems: Things that are intrinsic to the game. Chafing Problems: Things that are of the moment or easily adjusted. For a beta I'm willing to review and comment on core problems. Things like the intrinsic core game play loop not being fun. Non-Trivial Mechanics being convoluted. For Chafing Problems with server issues being number one, I'll tend to give a pass for beta and then about a month. There understandably just the hardest part after balance to test for the same reason. People are weird yo. That doesn't make them not the most annoying problems.
This is why it's a good idea to READ the reviews and see WHAT problems people are having with it. Never just go exclusively by the numbers. Like reviews saying it's buggy are expected during beta.....reviews saying it's really boring aren't. As far as being allowed to review - you should be allowed to review anything you're paying for. Because it's important to note that developers are NOT required to put a game in Early-Access mode. They're fully capable of releasing finished games.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're charging money for it, you've opened yourself up to reviews on whether that purchase is worthwhile yet or not. If you don't want that, don't do early access release, or do it for free. Game publishers are treating EA as a source of development revenue, but then don't want to have to deal with the consequences of charging people money for an incomplete product, customers that are purchasing it under the *hope* that it will eventually be worth the money they spent on it. And other customers have every right to know if current customers have found their purchase worthwhile yet, and what their confidence level is on whether the game will be worth the purchase come release. Besides, a lot of EA reviews are on actual content, not bugs. Sure, some peeps will throw negative reviews at a game due to bugs or connections problems during EA, and imo that's simply stupid. But if the game itself isn't fun, even in areas it is clearly reasonably fleshed-out, that's valid review material regardless of the state of the game.
Steam should display EA reviews and score separately from the "Stable" ones.
Isn't that kinda why they've got 2 different scores for "overall rating" and "recent rating"? It's why you can have actually good games that have an overall negative rating but an overwhelmingly positive recent rating aka no man's sky.
I think timberborn does it right. When you load the game it has a splash screen explaining it's not in its finished state and there will be crashes and changes over the development. Valheim I think also has a similar message. I think so long as Devs are transparent about it it's fine, but it also depends on the community as well. Folks into building/crafting games tend to have a different mindset to wh40k people.
Well, good point, sort of. People do have a mind an intelligence to a certain degree. And you might expect them to think for themselves and do research. Just like in the cake example, I personally don't think you should need to warn people about the cake, Stating "before it's done" should suffice. In my humble opinion at least.