So it’s Monday, and last week a veritable shitstorm was kicked up betweeen a games review site and an MMO developer, because of an incredily low review score.   I’m sure most of you have already followed the drama in its entirety, but if you haven’t, well you can see the original review here, Darkfall developer Tasos’ original reply, Eurogamer’s blogged reply to the reply, and then Tasos reply to Eurgamer’s reply.  Heheh.  Yeah.   Hey if nothing else I like to perform a public service.    Now, first, I don’t have a whole lot to say about the original discussion itself, except for this:  I’ve worked in the game industry for the past fifteen years.  Bad reviews get written all the time.  You may think think they’re justified, or you may think they’re shit.  But regardless of what you think, if you have a beef with a review, this is what happens.   The producer of the title picks up the phone and calls the Editor-in-Chief at the review site, and says What the fuck?  And they hash it out over the phone or over drinks at the local bar or whatever.  But professional developers don’t air their dirty laundry out on the their public fucking forums, unless they’re just looking for publicity.   Which apparently is exactly what Aventurine wanted, and what they got.  And then you sure as hell don’t respond in a public blog.  Both sides of this issue have acted more like zombie forum fan boys, and less like professionals, than they should have.  While the drama has certainly been entertaining, the fact of the matter is the vast majority of us should never have heard about any of it. 

Okay, that’s all I wanted to say on the issue itself, now on to talk about MMO reviews.  Because the one issue that has been brought up and kicked about as a result of this debacle is how long do you need to play an MMO before you can review it.  Aventurine says that the nine hours Eurogamer claims to have spent in the game aren’t anywhere near enough to review their MMO.  That real review sites have players playing the game and logging in hundreds of hours and that, as far as they’re concerned, is the only way their game could possibly be accurately reviewed.  Leslie Smith at Massively has posted a discussion that takes an incredily long time to get around to saying that the realities of life are that rarely do review sites have more than a few days to review any game, including MMO’s.  

But one thing Ms. Smith says that really deserves highlighting, because I think so many people forget it, is that, at the end of the day, a game review is one person’s opinion of a game.  And as the reader, you’re hoping for two things:  You’re hoping that the  reviewer spent enough time to give an informed opinion,  and second, that the reviewer has played enough games of a similar nature that they can provide an informed opinion.  It’s the first issue here though, that is the crux.  How much time is enough to give an informed opinion?

Well what it boils down to is pain tolerance.  We all have a threshold for how long we can play a game before we say “This game is a piece of shit.”  For some games, we never say that.  Those rare and wonderful games that are just damn good.  But for some games, we can say that in the first ten minutes.  And this is true for any game – MMO’s are no exception.  Why?  Because a game is only as good as as it’s weakest link (or links).  It may only take one piece, but if that one piece is a game breaker for you, then it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the game is, if you’ve already reached your pain tolerance.  Look I played Tabular Rasa for about 4 nights.  About 2 hours a night, so no more than a total of 8 hours.  And during that time, I learned that the game had a fundamental mechanic of running around in mouse look mode, with a targeting reticule that bounced and jostled all over the screen, but which left you in 3rd person mode.  I tried combat in that game for about 8 hours, and I came to realize taht I just didn’t like the way combat worked in that game.  It’s fundamental mechanic was broken for me.  Now was that a comprehensive review of the game?  Hell no it wasn’t.  But I knew that they could polish the crap out of the game, and it could have been the best, most perfectly balanced (if highly unlikely) end raiding game in the world, but if the fundamental way in which you played the game wasn’t fun, the rest of it didn’t matter.   And had I wrote reviews for a living at the time, I would have said as much.   Now, I played Auto Assault for about a month.  I found plenty to not like in the first five hours.  But the fundamentall game was fun, the experience wasn’t that unpleasant, and I had a really good time driving around and shooting the shit out of things for about a month or so before the complete lack of interesting content, terrible itemization, and complete inability to group in the game eventually  drove me away.  And most people reached their pain tolerance in that game way before I did. 

My point is for those two games, I reached my threshold of not having fun at completely different times.  And if you played those games, your pain tolerance was probably completely different than mine.  But I didn’t need to play either of those games any longer in order to decide that, for me, the game was not fun.  And ultimately, getting back to what we said ealier, that’s all a game review is.  One person’s opinion on whether or not the game is fun.

There are fun bits to all those games.  And if your pain tolerance is high enough (and I think mine is higher than many I know), and you stick with the game long enough, chances are you will find some fun bits in there.  And I think that is what many people talking about and around this issue are trying to say.  That in order to review an MMO you have to stick with it until you find the fun bits.  Or that you have to play all of it and see if any of the bits are fun before you can talk about any of it.  And all I’m saying is, I disagree.  I don’t have to play all of a game to decide if it’s fun.  It might take me a day, or a week, or a month. 

But I’m also perfectly capable of deciding a game is not fun in the first fifteen minutes of playing it, and that absolutely doesn’t make the opinion any less legitimate.

Comments are cool!  You should use them!

 Author’s note: I have corrected the pronoun referring to Ms. Smith.  My sincerest apologies for wrongly assumer her gender.  Teach me to do a little more investigation too!