Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Patch 1.0.7c

Well, I really hope they put the pedal to the metal a little more with 1.08. Only three patches in 24h was a tad bit disappointing .

Originally Posted by Corwin
Should I point out that there's been a more recent patch? Do we need a new thread?

I try not to flood the news with iterative hotfixes, and there were already a few for other games too. I prefer to announce them in the same thread as long as it seems to be an iteration to get to a stable patch anyway.

But that should be everyone's preference, if anyone would like to see that in the news more often and be sure not to miss it, please say so.

I think that most players are too far ahead of me now, since I decided to wait a little bit more for more patches.
Also, I'm not quite sure whether I'd want that - seemingly, to me - myriad of turn based battles being ahead before me (my last savegame is still in the prologue, second try).

So, this means to me that I won't participate with the discussions for the next days here anymore. I already got spoiled enough without even having to open the spoiler tags.

Originally Posted by Redglyph
Here is the post presenting the kitsune.

I don't know how it came into Pathfinder, or whether it's Paizo or a 3rd-party.

Afaik Kitsune have always been part of Pathfinder (and have not been introduced by a 3rd party).

Originally Posted by Redglyph
But that should be everyone's preference, if anyone would like to see that in the news more often and be sure not to miss it, please say so.

I think you should make a news posting as soon as a week has passed without a patch or hotfix.

And concerning Metacritics: The fact that it is used as benchmark for game quality by companies and investors would suggests that it is the best benchmark around, but it still wouldn't suggest that it is a good benchmark.

Originally Posted by Morrandir
And concerning Metacritics: The fact that it is used as benchmark for game quality by companies and investors would suggests that it is the best benchmark around, but it still wouldn't suggest that it is a good benchmark.

The average in itself doesn't mean much, especially if there are only scores from critics. When I look at Metacritic I'm interested in
1) the distribution of the user scores (ignoring the zero category - usually)
2) the links to the reviews, it's always interesting to see the pros/cons from the ones I trust.

But it's an interpretation exercise. For example Diablo II: Resurrected:
- critics are now 80% with 24 positive, 6 mixed, 0 negative (it's rare critics risk to put a negative score with known publishers)
- users are 49% with 403 positive, 34 mixed and 449 negative.

If I were interested in the game, I'd start looking whether it's review-bombed, because there is something very strange. Or, since it's a remaster and people can have very different expectations, I'd check if that's a bad game for a newcomer, but an interesting remaster for someone who played the original.

That's why I don't believe in a single-valued score for a game. We have different tastes and benchmarks, it's the why that interests me, not an averaged how much.

Yea, I think the critics overall review score is useless at metacritic.
Those are all biased often and corrupt game reviewers who often give 90% and higher routinely to games.

The user score can be very useful though, and that is the one I look at when checking out metacritic. But to me, by far the best is usually just reading reviews at steam.
I like to read the most critical reviews and then also positive reviews, for a good balance.

The positive reviews that say "100%! Great." obviously don't help much either, so I look for in-depth positive and negative reviews, which actually seem to be semi-objective and may even list a weakness or two (in positive reviews) or a strength or two (in negative reviews) which I get alot more out of than the one-liner reviews.

Originally Posted by Arkadia7
The user score can be very useful though, and that is the one I look at when checking out metacritic. But to me, by far the best is usually just reading reviews at steam.
I like to read the most critical reviews and then also positive reviews, for a good balance.

The positive reviews that say "100%! Great." obviously don't help much either

I feel the same. User scores are more representative of the general quality of a game, as the ones who paid for the product and have the right to give their opinion about it. Even if often very biased and erratic in their way to grant scores, users do form a massive collective that averages out towards a pretty valid conclusion.

All the 10/10 reviews "Awesome game" might as well just not be there, waste of internet space really. Much of the same can be said of 0/10 reviews, although they usually have an actual explanation of why the 0 was given, unlike the 10/10 reviews.

If you read for example WotR most upvoted positive user review it says the following:

"awesome game. If you need some D & D in your life, this is the game for you." 10/10.

That tells anyone exactly zero useful things about the game, other than it uses a DnD setting, which is a given.

It's normally the more neutral opinions that range from 4 to 8 scores, the ones that have the most useful insight. Even when you can't agree with the score, they do disect aspects of the game and explain their reasoning.

The bottom line is that all games go through this. Unless it's a case like Diablo2, which is getting review bombed because of recent controversy and the general corporation hate that runs rampant in the world these days, every game that gets released gets their similar percent of fans/haters countering each other, and in the end, the average user score does give a representative value of how good the game is in the grand scheme of things.

I personally don't value anyone's opinion to decide how good a game is for me, however. What is good for me I decide on my own. What the sum and average of everyone's opinions does is tell me is what is objectively good for the majority of people who play the type of games I play, and what isn't.

Originally Posted by Nereida
I personally don't value anyone's opinion to decide how good a game is for me, however. What is good for me I decide on my own.

Yep, but you don't know that before you play the game, do you?
I like to have some opinions of others to prevent bad buys. That's one reason why I'm at the Watch.

I'm still unsure what to make of Metacritcs, Steam reviews etc. I'm still doing a self-experiment where before I buy a game I note Steam score and both Metacritics scores and also an expected score (so how I think I will rate the game when it's finished.)
After I finished the game I give it a personal rating. So far I've surveyed these numbers for more than 50 games and calculated the correlation between these 4 predictions and my final score.
The results so far are quite surprising. I thought that my own expectation would be a lot better than the other scores. But in contrary:
My own expecation score has the lowest correlation (coefficient is 0.33), followed by Metacritc User score (0.37), Steam score (0.45) and finally Metacritc regular score (0.53).
So, yeah… apparently for me these scores make some sense.

Cool experiment @Morrandir

I don't use scores other than as a mild indicator on whether more research is needed. I also don't buy games based on developer.

In general genre and type of game has the most impact. I will then research it and if it looks interesting and doesn't have any "no-go" issues I will then dig into it.

Scores only have a small impact. I don't use metacritic. Usually steam or general reviews. If they are mixed or low then I will try to find comments and dig into why it was low. Sometimes it is very valid other times it is something I don't consider a negative or not worth deducting points for.

If a game is over all positive, and it also meets all my desires, then I am more likely to skip additional intensive research and give it a try.

In general low scores simply mean I want to do more research before making a decision.

Originally Posted by Morrandir
Yep, but you don't know that before you play the game, do you?
I like to have some opinions of others to prevent bad buys. That's one reason why I'm at the Watch.

Of course, and first-hand opinion of others is often more helpful than just seeing a number attached to a game, but honestly, I don't know if you have the same experience as me, but regardless of what others say I can tell whether I will like a game or not with extreme accuracy only by seeing a few screenshots or at most watching a short clip of actual gameplay. The only thing that is hard to predict is the bugs, which does suck, because it has ruined otherwise pretty good games for me, so that's really what I look for most in people's feedback these days - how polished the release is.

As a safety net, there is the Steam refund option. If they are going to plague the world with DRM, I'm going to use the hell out of this one marvelous service they offer - Full refund, no questions asked, if the product is refunded within 2 weeks of purchase, and has under 2 hours of playtime.