Gaming
Steam Responds to Review Bombing by Changing User Reviews
It seems like the previous incident with Firewatch and Pewdiepie has caught the attention of Valve. Through a blog post the company underlines a few changes that are going to be done to user reviews. These changes are meant to stop the effectivity of what’s known as “Review bombing”, regardless of circumstance.
Why is this a big problem according to Steam? According to the blog post, “one thing we’ve noticed is that the issue players are concerned about can often be outside the game itself.” The problem comes by the fact that the reviews are meant to the product in general. And according to Steam developers, things such as something the developer has said online. Choices the developer has made in the Steam version of their game relative to other platforms. Or simple distaste towards their political conviction/stance aren’t relevant.
Remember when I completely skipped the DRM issue with Sonic Mania and proceeded to review the game as is? It wasn’t until the DRM was cracked that I talked about the issue because I believed that a DRM issue shouldn’t hold back what’s an otherwise good game. That’s the approach Steam is taking towards the issue of Review bombing.
“When it comes to the Review Score itself, however, it’s even less clear that these out-of-game reasons are relevant. When we look at what happens with the Review Score after a review bomb, we see that it generally recovers, in some cases fully back to where it was beforehand.” Then, the blog adds the following. “This implies that, while the review bombers were unhappy with a decision the developer made, the purchasers of the product afterwards were often as happy with the game as the players before them.”
This was something I wanted to talk about in a scrapped Op-ed regarding Pewdiepie and his fanbase. Because it seems like they thought that review bombing Firewatch’s Steam page would lower sales or something. While it did nothing but change the review score average from “Mostly positive” to “Mixed”.
Valve looked at many ways to solve the issue. One of them being locking off people from reviewing for a period of time. But this isn’t a solution they’d want to take. “We didn’t like the way this ultimately meant restricting the ability for players to voice their opinions. We don’t want to stop the community having a discussion about the issue they’re unhappy about, even though there are probably better places to have that conversation than in Steam User Reviews.”
So, the solution now is to implement graphs that are going to reflect how much the Steam reviews have changed over time. Each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game. This solution aims to make customers decide whether or not the reasoning for a review bombing of a game is their concern or not.
This doesn’t really fix much except giving the potential buyer a choice of whether or not they find reviews relevant. Which really is something a lot of people do by default (I know I do). Since User Reviews are really depending on the “Mood of the audience”, it’s not that hard to find that the review system isn’t really accurate to determine if a game is really good or not.
I’m sure there are better ways to address these issues. Ones that keep the discussion afloat without relying on a score given by the community. But the best we can do is wait and see what happens.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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