IGN did NOT like Elex - 4.9/10
 

http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/10/20/elex-review
That's one thing I don't like if true, it's why I don't care for 'NPC schedules'. I take that as suspension of disbelief, when my character goes to an NPC it doesn't mean the NPC is fixed in place, that's just me (the player) feedback on what him (the character) did: he got there, asked some random villager about NPC's house, they told him where it is, he got there, NPC was sleeping, he waited and came back in the morning. I don't have to see that as it's totally uneventful, just like I don't have to see my character peeing to believe he actually does pee.

IGN sees problems that don't exist in my game.

Misplaced map markers? What bloody map markers? This is supposed to be an exploration, not handheld game.
Also, what exactly is so buggy one can't finish the game? I have yet to see a bug that I'd call critical. Etc.

They're not incorrect in everything. NPC AI definetly has problems and I've posted it in early impressions. However, it happens only if I engage with melee weapon. If I shoot with the bow first, no problem, AI joins the fight immediately. Simply a bug that will get patched sooner or later.

Yes mr. IGN reviewer, you are.

In the past IGN showered utterly broken games with scores above 9. They lost credibility with me ages ago.
Panning Elex just because it isn't mediocre casual crap is not gonna change my mind about IGN.

I'm not saying the score IGN put is wrong. Maybe upon completing it I reach the same conclusion and set it low (I mean, trashmobs respawn, that's instantly -1 on my scale).
Whatever score I'll wield, definetly won't reflect silly reasons IGN listed.

Fluent, are you posting as Joxer? ;) First DOS2 and now Elex; can European devs do no wrong in your book, J? I can wait till your other hand is free for your response….

Yes, I'm joking.

LOL
Of course european devs can do wrong.
A recent example I played is Styx. It starts great then falls into abyss - you're crawling through the same few areas over and over only trashmobs and locations of collectibles get different. I cannot recommend this game to anyone. Scratch that. To those who adore grinding, this game will feel like a paradise. To me, it's just another garbage.

Sadly I didn't play Styx 2 long enough to know if it's the same repetition garbage. It's on pause since too many RPGs released one after another - Styx and it's sequel are stealth games amd not RPG so it can wait.
But in this case, Dishonored series is vastly superior.

If we'll talk only about recent RPGs, I believe I've repeated a few times that there is only one game from Kickstarter I backed that's an utter disappointment: Earthlock. It's dev. studio pushed the worst possible console/phone designs onto PC and is from Norway. Not only the game is annoying with respawns, it's story can't be more boring than it is. puzzles are on kindergarden level and such disastrous interface on PC I haven't seen in a decade. It's worse than pisspoor Neptunia port!
There is no way I'd ever back any possible future project that comes from them.

Erm… As usual, my other hand is not free. I'm always smoking in my room. Yea. White walls became yellow walls over time, black lungs are imminent doctors say, etc.
But you knew that. :)

I actually agree with you about IGN though. When were they last relevant, 1995?

Well they just acquired Humble Bundle so that made them relevant this week :)

I feel like the hivemind was expecting a bad game so the first reviews were in anticipation of that and written with that expectation in their subconscious. I expect now that the game is much better than expected (1100+ reviews on Steam and still Mostly Positive, which was unexpected), future reviews and overall perception of the quality of the game will go up.

So, yeah. 4.9 is hilarious though. This is my GOTY by far so far.

Everyone knows you pay IGN for reviews.
Not even joking….

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I don't pay any attention to these sites anymore. They are dinosaurs in the gaming world. But I have been keeping an eye on the Steam reception and it's much better than I expected it would be. Lots of positive reviews not only from Gothic/PB fans but newcomers as well. It's an interesting twist of events as I expected much harsher reception on Steam.

Like their No Mans Sky review….
Everything was awesome, 9/10…
Then came the storm of shit from players, they changed early review number to "in progress" and a couple weeks later gave it "OKAY" rating..
After advertising the everlivingness out of it…

IGN is the literal definition of paid shill.

Or simply incompetent shill. Or shill wanting the acceptance of a certain set of gamers for ultimately financial reasons. They could have not wanted to seem "out of line" with the other reviews and wave of negativity that was happening with the game at the time as they feel they'd lose credibility or something.

Just another reason I have been scanning user reviews for years now. It's much better coming right from the gamer and you can pick out useful bits in each review.

Not the first time they did this. I believe they gave Prey 4/10 because of a savegame bug that wasn't even widespread.

Giving a game an unusually low score stands out like a sore thumb and give the site more traffic.

Bah! Deceitful bastards. :P

Meanwhile on Steam reviews… as of now-
All (1747)
Positive (1364)
Negative(383)

So,that has to mean something. Right?

Exactly.

I suspect when reviewers start getting wind of this you'll see some "revised reviews", or at the very least new reviews coming out that are more positive. IMO.

Wow! That's insane bro. lol

Oh dear, that was a console review, so I wouldn't give it much credence for a PC playthrough. Control issues, bugs, and not liking a challenge seems to be the common themes in these low score reviews.

Ah ok, so that's not even the PC version? I was about to go on a rant about how blantantly false so much of what he said was. Still, I find it hard to believe the console version could be that much worse than the PC version.

Saves me the trouble of ranting too. :P

Another review mentioning major bugs… Has anyone here on PC encountered major bugs yet? The only bugs I've had are gfx glitches, e.g. I've had NPCs walking through me (though, better than blocking me I guess) and a glitch where I kept popping up and down, into and out of the floor during a conversation. I'm only 7 or 8 hours in, though.

Edit: oh, see the technical issues thread. Even then, I expected much more.

Nah, none for me. Minus like, folded arms slightly clipping through the chests of NPCs. 13 hours in here.

Saw some Steam users also commenting that it has little or no bugs in their games either.

Well, remember these guys already finished the game. DOS2 also had little to no major bugs at the start, for the first 20 hours or so, then leave island 2 and your experience might be quite different.

They also played the unpatched version.

A bit like you see a lot of problems/bugs in Skyrim that l never experienced? :-)

Some bugs appear to almost everyone, others are experienced by some people and not others. Partly due to what parts of game they're playing, partly due to other things.

pibbur who himself thankfully is not bug free.

PS: I admit that it seems that more people had problems with Skyrim, so maybe I was lucky. DS.

Hah!

pibbur who hopes (but cannot exclude) that it their nationality doesn't have something to do with it.

I had crashes recently on laptops and it went away after disabling auto save but not everyone has this issue.

Based on want I am seeing on gog and steam forums, this game does have fair share of bugs for some people compared to most AAA games these days…

Your GOTY so far by far?? I haven't played it yet (I intend to), but it's above Original Sin 2??? Original Sin 2 is shaping up to be an all-time great for me, even if I enjoy Elex a lot, I am very doubtful it will come close to it.

Well, i don't like IGN. So, we're even.

IGN is the Skip Bayless of gaming sites. They throw out insane arguments just to get attention.

I wasn't into DOS 2. Maybe I'll give it another crack again in the future, but it just didn't grab me. But I love ELEX so far. I expected that too really. But the game is a bit better than I even thought it would be.

Different people like different games; that why their is a vote at the end of the year :)

I just find it hard to believe or maybe understand how these sites are honestly giving the game these scores. Accounting for tastes I could understand 6's and 7's, but 4's? It's really like we're not playing the same game.

It also seems like some reviews are panning the game for the challenging core design principles that Piranha Bytes uses in their games. Yet I didn't see them saying the same about Dark Souls, another challenging (albeit for different reasons) RPG that played by its own rules.

Knowledgeable people on the Steam forums are also pointing out that the reviews contain false information about the game in terms of the design of it. And there is a big disconnect in the Steam reviews and the paid review sites in terms of score, as there are currently over 1300 reviews on Steam and 73% of them are Positive. With almost 20k people in-game right now.

It's just strange to me. Bzzt bzzt…does not compute. :uhoh:

I can't remember the last time i read a review from a gaming site. They only time i see any mention of scores are when people post the scores here. As i said previously, i pay more attention to gamers (especially from this site) reviews than gaming sites.

Same here. I just comment on it because it's a bit, I dunno…troubling, when IGN and these sites have millions of subscribers, many of which will see such a low score and completely disregard the game. IGN has 9 million subs, for example.

Ah well. It's frustrating but also nothing new with PB games. But the cool twist here is that this is a PB game that is even converting more casual gamers/those unfamiliar with PB's design. That was completely unexpected.

I guess the "by far" statement just caught me off guard, since there have been other great games released this year. I tend to appreciate games from Piranha Bytes and I imagine I will enjoy this one too. That said, they aren't everyone's cup of tea and I almost anticipated there being some lower scores.

I anticipated lower scores too. What I didn't anticipate is the positive response on Steam. 3 out of 4 who reviewed it so far have left positive reviews, often glowing about the positive aspects of the game, with 1300+ total reviews in already. Pretty shocking to me because like you said, PB games are not everyone's cup of tea. This game is sort of converting some people into fans it seems.

After playing more, the world design of ELEX is astounding. How they managed to do what they did with 27 people is a miracle of game design. It's basically the detail and quality level of Skyrim, yet with actual challenging RPG mechanics and meaningful design. I'm up exploring near some huge domed city with a Ghostfence thing around it. Everything is hand-placed and there for a reason, whether it's a very tough monster or two or a hard-to-reach chest with quality (and never random-feeling) loot. The jetpack helps exploration greatly and there is a ton of verticality to the world. It's pretty amazing.

I'd probably say this is the best open-world design I've seen yet. It's very close to the quality of Skyrim or Fallout from Bethesda in that area IMO, but with the benefits of PB's design philosophy. I'm having a blast man.

I've played DOS:2 and am currently playing Elex. Both are great games and what I would expect from their devs, but I do believe that DOS:2 is a better, more innovative game than Elex; it's an instant classic, while Elex is a typical though very well done PB game and like all PB games was an automatic buy for me!!

@Corwin, Funny, because I feel the exact opposite way. Although I only played D:OS 2 for a couple hours, it felt like much more of the same, i.e. traditional turn-based, party-based CRPG. Didn't grab me at the time so I stopped playing.

ELEX on the other hand has me waking up early in the morning and basically running to the computer like I'm 5 years old again and playing Nintendo. Haven't been this excited by a game in awhile. :)

I'm no stranger to PB games so I'll wait for the community patch but hearing this has made me a little more interested. :)