First, he didn’t dock points. That’s not how reviews work. You judge your overall experience. You don’t start at 10 and then start taking points off. His experience included a game breaking bug. A game he couldnt’ finish was never going to get a good score.

He could have done that. IGN does have Review in Progress. I wouldn’t blame him for that, but I don’t blame him for not doing that. Every review is ultimately that reviewers opinion based on his or her experience with the game. This score represents Dan’s experience with the game, after the damn thing was out.

How many chances are they supposed to get? He tried pretty hard to get through the game, and the bug wouldn’t let him. He eventually just wrote his review based on the experience he had with the game, which is what all reviewers do. Then they put out a patch to address this issue, and I don’t know if that…

I agree with you, though I would point out they don’t actually dock points. They look at the whole experience and decide what that experience deserves. In this case, he decided the overall experience was bad because of this.

He has to review the game based on his experience. This wasn’t just a bug. It wouldn’t allow him to continue. His saves were constantly being corrupted. What is he supposed to do? Just give it a good score based on what he hears from other people?

The thing is, they debate when they should re-review a game at IGN a lot. Generally they won’t do it for a patch. They feel that’s a slippery slope. Games get patched constantly, and there are a lot of games that are launched broken and take multiple patches to fix. It’s just not worthwhile for them to write a new…

He literally could not advance in the game because of this bug. That warrants a 4.0. I mean, just for a second, lets set aside the fix. If you are judging a game based on your own experience and the game will not let you progress because it keeps destroying your save, a 4.0 is a fair score. It was a persistent…

How was he supposed to continue? It destroyed his saves, multiple times. He had no reason to believe that would stop. He clearly persisted for a while, and he even contacted the publisher and they tried to fix it for him. It’s not his fault they released a game with a serious game-breaking bug. And you’re right…

I don’t buy that one bit. I’ve heard Dan Stapleton go on about their scoring system and how it’s meant to inform their audience on a few IGN podcasts. He’s the head of reviews over there, and he takes that very seriously. If anything, he gave the 4 to warn the audience. I can’t imagine him using a review to punish…

Plus, they are just more forgiving about bugs prior to launch, just because they assume it’s going to be fixed. I doubt Dan Stapleton would have felt comfortable putting a score on this review if this had happened prior to launch.

I would say that this does serve a purpose though. People have often complained about how much influence Metacritic has, but developers do pay attention to it. This will drop the score there. Even though only a small number of players will experience this, their experience should be reflected in the metascore. …

Do you have a source for the idea that it was cut on purpose?

As I said to someone else, I’m not talking about this leak. This is something I’ve been wondering since this whole thing came up. They moved the pipeline because there was a huge risk it was going to leak into the water supply, and they wanted it where it would do less damage. But that also makes it impossible for…

I’m not talking about this spill specifically. I’m saying, they moved the pipeline because they knew the risk was too high to the water supply where it was going to be. However, there is a risk to the water supply where it’s going now, too. So, it’s going to be impossible for them to claim they didn’t see it…

I think it might have been too far of a left turn. It was a good game, but it was so different from other ME titles. Generally ME games have weaker gameplay, but amazing stories. The story in this was mediocre, but the gameplay was much better. It felt like I was playing Far Cry or something. It just seemed like…

The problem is the press from the ME3 ending had damaged the image of the franchise. Whether you like it or hate, that’s just true. Now you have a game that was reviewed lower, plus had a really rough launch. This was already a second chance for the series. If you are looking at it from a business perspective, the…

I don’t see how that’s true. First of all, this other BioWare team isn’t really from BioWare. EA decided a few years after they bought BioWare that they should slap that name on any studio working on RPGs. BioWare had a great reputation for RPGs, so why not use that? So, this is just another EA studio, which…

The thing I’ve never understood about this is, isn’t the inevitable lawsuit going to be a pretty easy win? They moved the damn thing because they were afraid of what would happen to the water supply if it leaked. Doesn’t that show that they knew they were potentially going to poison people? The only reason I can…

Personally, it just didn’t hold my interest. The combat is amazing, but the story didn’t do much for me. And I had one of the buggiest experiences of probably anybody who played the game. I compared my experience with a bunch of others in a gaming related Facebook group, and no one saw bugs like I did. It crashed…

Okay, so obviously this law itself is terrible. However, I was just struck by how insulting the language is. By defining heterosexuality as “natural” and “ordinary,” they are basically calling LGBT people freaks. Whoever wrote that shit, go to hell.