Welcome to Critical Miss. In this article I will be covering
how accepting we have become with rating our video games.
‘Seriously?!’ I shouted, as I found out I had to kill one of
the apprentice mages in the College of Winterhold in Bethesda Softworks’s new
hit game The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. A glitch in the software made it where I
could not complete the quest as normal on the PS3. Then, in my sleuthing
adventures I found that there are guides to all the PS3, 360 and PC workarounds
there are just to play the game. This got me thinking…
HOW DOES THIS CRAP A GOOD GAME?!
It seems to me, that reviewers rate games like they are on a
balancing scale, rather than an average representation of the game as a whole. A
game riddled with bugs that hinder your gameplay should not be rated so high! I will continue to use Skyrim as my example
for the rest of this article.
The gaming industry tries to impress us with many things (graphics,
music, story to name a few) and sometimes it backfires. The thing we have
become complacent with is overlooking some grave errors that would have burned
lower budget games. $60 is a good clutch to be dishing out on a video game, and
we have a right to be mad when it feels ill spent. That is about 10 hours for
someone working on minimum wage! Even at $12 an hour, that game cost you about
6 hours of work.
So when a big named company (Bethesda Softworks) releases a ‘AAA’
game (Skyrim) it makes you wonder, why would anyone bother paying that much for
a broken experience? Why do reviewers at large companies manage to overlook
these errors as if the graphics manage to make up for it, or that the controls are
‘solid’?
The excuses I have read from press statements have led up to
one big issue for Bethesda Softworks, they do not know how to write code for
the PS3. It wasn’t until the expansion, Dawnguard, that they were willing to
admit this; even then they are just now reaching out to Sony for assistance on
how to make it work.
I would say, the overall experience was alright; but if I
had a time machine, I would tell the slightly younger me to hold out until I
could get it for under $30.
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