Earlier this year I revealed the dark truth about reviewing sports games (it sucks) and now I’m back to drop truth bombs about another
aspect of game reviews – reviewing online multiplayer games also totally
sucks. It sucks so much I don’t even
bother reviewing the multiplayer aspect of most games anymore. It is impossible to play enough to get it
right, and even if you do put a lot of effort in the online community will
inevitably come to the opposite conclusion anyway. This might just sound like a rant, but I have 15+ years of
experience on the subject, so pull up a chair and learn why reviewing online
multiplayer games is the goddamn worst.
Why does reviewing online multiplayer games suck so much? Well, mostly it has to do with the fact that
the reviews themselves are fairly pointless because they are immediately out of
date and wrong the minute real gamers get their hands on a title. Similar to sports games, the experiences of
dedicated players can be wildly different from the experiences of game
reviewers in online multiplayer games.
Dedicated players will find exploits and balance problems and glitches
and issues and all sorts of stuff game reviewers won’t even be aware of / won’t
find / or they won’t crop up until weeks after launch, long after the reviewer
has moved on to covering something else.
This makes the review text written at launch pretty much worthless and
most sites don’t bother to update it.
It certainly doesn’t help that many sites review online
multiplayer pre-release purely in an effort to be one of the first to get a
review out. They play with other media
or against PR people / developers on servers with no load, which absolutely is not
the way most gamers will experience the game come launch day. Any glowing praise of network stability or
balance or any of that stuff in day 1 reviews is complete hogwash. Some sites do update the online multiplayer
section of their reviews over the week or so after launch, but as I mentioned
above, dedicated players are going to play exponentially more hours and dig far
deeper than any member of the media will bother and find problems weeks and
months after launch that the media won’t notice / won’t report on / won’t care
about. Thus, online multiplayer reviews
are pretty much pointless.
Allow me to speak from experience on exactly how this can
all go horribly wrong. When the Halo
Master Chief Collection came out in 2014 the multiplayer matchmaking was not
turned on prior to release. We in the
media instead tested out the game by playing private matches with PR /
developers in order to test out the multiplayer. Our experience in these tests was fine but, obviously, when the
matchmaking was turned on at launch for the public the whole online component
of the game fell apart at the seams and was a total shitshow. All of the glowing reviews written before
release had to be hastily edited and everyone in the media looked like freaking
idiots for praising a title that launched as a broken mess and hasn’t really
been fully fixed even two years later.
Halo MCC is an extreme example but this sort of thing
happens constantly with online multiplayer games. Game reviewers simply can’t spend enough time to play them
properly to thoroughly review them and the result are reviews that are pretty
much worthless within a few weeks after launch.
I have to admit that I honestly don’t play most online
multiplayer games very much, but I’ll give another example of games I actually
really love and have spent tons of time with – Plants vs. Zombies Garden
Warfare 1 and 2. When PVZGW2 first
launched one of the plant classes, Rose, was totally unbalanced and
overpowered. You’d face plant teams
made up exclusively of Roses and the zombies literally could not win. Rose was drastically nerfed a week or so
after launch, but gamers just found a new exploit to take advantage of. Every time something gets fixed a new cheap
tactic or exploit will pop up so the balance of the game constantly swings back
and forth and the experience wildly changes with every new patch and
update. It is impossible to review the
actual quality of matches and experience you’ll have in PVZGW2, and pretty much
every other online game, because it constantly changes.
Because of these and other experiences over the last
15-years I have significantly decreased the time and effort I put into
reviewing the online multiplayer aspect of most games. I’ll talk about what features and modes are
available and explain any new innovations or ideas are introduced, but I’m
staying as far away from covering the meat and potatoes actual gameplay of
online multiplayer as I can. Anyone
that knows me knows that I hate being wrong and the amount of frustration
online multiplayer reviews have caused when I think something is fine and then
everyone hates it two weeks after launch really, really grinds my gears. It just isn’t worth it.
One more brief story.
When Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came out in 2007 I (and a fair few
other reviewers) thought the multiplayer wasn’t going to be anything
special. Call of Duty multiplayer was
sort of an “OK” throwaway mode up to that point and no one really thought
Modern Warfare was a drastic improvement.
Well, we were all wrong and players latched onto Modern Warfare and Call
of Duty became the biggest multiplayer franchise in the industry. Of course, the pendulum has swung back the
other way and now everyone bitches about everything in Call of Duty multiplayer
and no one is ever satisfied. See what
I mean? Reviewers just can’t ever get
it right.
A final point I want to make is that, despite the vocal
dudebros on forums and social media that only play multiplayer and never touch
the campaigns (or so they claim) there are tons and tons of people out there
that do play Halo and Call of Duty and Gears of War and Battlefield just for
the campaigns and other offline content they offer. These players deserve representation and coverage just as much as
the multiplayer fans and I’m more than happy to provide it. And not just provide it, but give genuine
high quality coverage that you can count on not just at launch but years from
now because the campaign isn’t going to drastically change in a week.
So, to sum up, reviewing online multiplayer games
sucks because it is impossible to actually be accurate without turning coverage
of each game into a full time job.
Other sites out there that are dedicated and want to give them good
coverage, I totally respect you and wish you luck, but I’m really thankful I
don’t have to do it anymore.