Ask Slashdot: Why Are Some Great Games Panned And Some Inferior Games Praised?

dryriver writes: A few years ago I bought a multiplayer war game called Soldner that I had never heard of before. (The game is entirely community maintained now and free to download and play at www.soldnersecretwars.de) The professional reviews completely and utterly destroyed Soldner — buggy, bad gameplay, no singleplayer mode, disappointing graphics, server problems and so on. For me and many other players who did give it a chance beyond the first 30 minutes, Soldner turned out to be THE most fun, addictive, varied, sattisfying and multi-featured multiplayer war game ever. It had innovative features that AAA titles like Battlefield and COD did not have at all at the time — fully destructible terrain, walls and buildings, cool physics on everything from jeeps flying off mountaintops to Apache helicopters crashing into Hercules transport aircraft, to dozens of trees being blown down by explosions and then blocking an incoming tank's way. Soldner took a patch or three to become fully stable, but then was just fun, fun, fun to play. So much freedom, so much cool stuff you can do in-game, so many options and gadgets you can play with. By contrast, the far, far simpler — but better looking — Battlefield, COD, Medal Of Honor, CounterStrike war games got all the critical praise, made the tens of millions in profit per release, became longstanding franchises and are, to this day, not half the fun to play that Soldner is. How does this happen? How does a title like Soldner that tried to do more new stuff than the other war games combined get trashed by every reviewer, and then far less innovative and fun to play war games like BF, COD, CS sell tens of millions of copies per release and get rave reviews all around?

75% Marketing 25% bugs

[randomErr]

I have never heard of this game and I keep my ear very close to the metaphorical gaming rail. Add to it you said it was buggy to first 30 minutes. Sometimes that all the time a review has to play a game. Also what kind of single player campaign does it have? If its multi-player only and the server are desolate the game is virtually useless. Most good game have to have a pristine first level and solid offline mode to have a chance to make it last.

Marketing, kid.

[UnknownSoldier]

Q. Why do you think Crapivision can keep re-selling the _same_ game over and over again?
A. Marketing

The problem is mainstream reviewers are bought off. They don't call out the developers for shoveling their crap -- "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." -- because if they did, they would lose "early access" and "exclusives".

Some people DO call out these shenanigans. i.e. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (CoD:MWR) just won the "Worst Game of 2016" from The Jimquisition [youtu.be]
i.e. The *only* way to get CoD:MW