if the employees were actually playing the game, I don't think it's out of line for them to vote for themselves (similar to academy members voting for themselves at the oscars or someone running for office voting for themselves on the ballot)... less so if said employees had no experience with the game and created accounts just for the purpose of drumming up their score.EA essentially confirmed that they did this.
http://kotaku.com/#!5782097/dragon-age-ii-dev-rates-his-own-game-on-metacritic-ea-bets-obama-voted-for-himself-too
i'd half way expect someone to find confirmation of them paying for glowing reviews on this one ala kane and lynch after an admission like this.
I played Dragon Age: Origins on the PC. I enjoyed it enough to play through the entire game + expansion and bought some of the DLC packages, but not so much that I played through it multiple times; it was probably an 8/10 for me.
after hearing about "omg consolization" for DA2, I figured if the same was designed for consoles, I may as well just buy it for my xbox. I don't know if it's me or the fact that I'm playing it on a console, but I seem to be enjoying it a lot more than people who are playing it on the PC. I'd probably rate it a 7/10 -- above average -- taking away points for the reused dungeons (though even with varied dungeons, DA:O felt a lot more like a dungeon crawler slog to me sometimes) and the lack of an awesome overarching story.
Imagine if the DA2 game came out first, and the DA:O engine was the sequel. The first game would have done well, and the second would have done even better with awesome reviews. That is what happens when a sequel is far superior to the original.
There were no points. You just spouted ill-conceived insults and try to pass them off as an argument. Equivalent:
Or maybe the critics are letting money cloud their judgment while users don't let such petty motives cloud their reviews.
Thinking video game critics aren't bought off and regularly so is about as naive as you can get, and EA is the company famous for doing so (See the whole deal with Kane and Lynch)(not that they're the only ones).
Except there is no evidence that game critics commonly do that. Literally gamers just see what they think are bad games getting good reviews and they think, "OMG the critics must have been bought off!"
Bribery was never confirmed in that case, and that's just a single example.
But speaking of EA, let's look at Dante's Inferno. It was one of there biggest games at the beginning of last year. They were clearly willing to spend money on advertising it, even getting a Superbowl commercial. And yet, the Xbox 360 metacritic review score was 73, and the PS3 score was 75. If EA was buying off critics, shouldn't the game have reached a mid-high 80s total? Much-maligned places like IGN and Gamespot actually ended up giving the game scores of 75 and 65, respectively.
Unless they created multiple accounts to boost reviews, I don't see the problem. As long as it's one review per person they're entitled to review it as they damn well please. The fact that they used the same handles for metacritic as they do elsewhere kind of shows that they weren't trying to hide or get away with anything.
Haters gonna hate
the dev mentioned in the kotaku article deleted his metacritic account almost immediately after people discovered he worked for bioware.
i'd have no problem with this if they were just giving their honest review of the game... but it seems WAY shady that they all waited until the game started getting universally bad user reviews to start making accounts giving it all 10's.
not to mention the russian dev that asked bioware forum users to make metacritic accounts and give the game 10's before the game was even released in russia.
but asking users who haven't played the game to essentially do what you just described... that's completely ok?
Again, I haven't read what was posted.
next time do that before you call anyone a dipshit, dipshit.
took me 5
Took me even less than that. When I saw how the battle system worked, I immediately quit and uninstalled. I think steam said I had 2 minutes in the demo.
That said, the spamming of 0's and 1's in reviews really kind of bother me. While the game didn't appeal to me, I'm sure if I bought it and stuck with it, it'd probably rate around 6 or 7 out of 10.
Likewise, it's really annoying when the internet universally gives 1 star reviews on Amazon for PC games that have DRM. Yea, some of the DRM sucks, but it doesn't warrant mass 1 star reviews.
Jesus... some of you guys are blaming EA for shit they didn't even do.
Kane and Lynch was EIDOS! EA had absolutely nothing to do with that game. Eidos was the one that paid for all the advertising and complained to gamespot when they got a bad review. There's at least 3 people in this thread blaming EA for this. Is your hate that blind that you'll just plug in whatever horrible thing you remember happening and blame EA?
"Shit... remember when EA killed all them jews?"
"Yeah I hate those guys! But I think that earthquake they caused in Japan was worse."
"You might be right."
Dipshits...
After playing the demo, and reading some the design issues that caused people to not like Dragon Age 2, I gave the game the biggest Zero grade possible: I didn't buy it.
It's hovering around a possible five grading from me in the future: I might buy it when it goes on sale around $5.
Less evil? It's the company that destroyed Infinity Ward and took away servers for Modern Warfare 2 on PC. Not to mention it's headed by gaming's #1 own worst enemy, Bobby Kotick.
So you gave the game, and you never even played it?
You played the demo, and read other peoples reviews to make your choice - so sad.