Fucking finally. I love a funny joke but if you’re looking for serious reviews, you currently have to wade through a sea of trolls, jokes and copy-pasted meme reviews in order to figure out if a game is interesting to you.
Community features are cool but if you’re the most popular platform of your kind, you’re gonna attract a lot of trolls who’s content can be really out there. Filters are a good solution to this!
Better than sex
- the most genius comedian of all time
Nobody will read this so I’ll just say it: I’m gay.
A lot of them aren’t even about the game at all…
And people explaining what the game is instead of how the game is.
A review should tell you what the game is. It should also tell you what they like/don’t like about it, but different perspectives about how the core mechanics work are absolutely critical parts of the discussion.
Indeed, sometimes I really appreciate a heads up of if I can save in the middle of gameplay or if I have to complete a whole run before it saves progress, things like that are not deal breakers but it can definitely affect how I play a game
There’s stuff like that, but it’s also as simple as most game pages just not accurately depicting what the core gameplay loop is. The number of games with 10 cinematic trailers that combine for 3 seconds of gameplay and have descriptions full of setting with maybe some features but don’t mention whether they’re a card game or an FPS is way too high.
Screenshots can probably resolve my example, and tags are “OK”, but marketing trash is just so abundant that a lot of pages are genuinely hard to figure out pretty basic elements of what the minute to minute experience is.
God I hate cinematic trailers for unreleased games. It’s fine if it’s a released game that I can just Google gameplay.
I straight up am not interested in them at all.
There are some games where I become attached to the writing, even though most are pretty mediocre and it’s not why I play games. But I’ve never once had a story trailer interest me in any way. I will play the game if the mechanics are compelling, regardless of story. If they aren’t, the story isn’t better than a book or TV show and I don’t care.
It’s super annoying when even the screenshots are cinematic nonsense. It’s a game. I want to know what the game is.
different perspectives about how the core mechanics work
As you said, how they work. The description already tells me what the game is and I don’t need a review reciting it a la “Shadow warrior is an action adventure fps game where you play as a ninja fighting against demons”
Descriptions are useless horseshit.
A review that doesn’t mention what the actual gameplay loop is is a bad review.
To further flesh out your comment:
I recently played a small game called “Ever Forward” on the Nintendo switch. Nowhere it says that the game runs like a PowerPoint presentation. Other than that, it would be helpful if I would have read a review that said “the beautiful world you see in the trailer and screenshots is the ‘hub’ where you enter boring looking levels. The puzzles consist of 2-3 cameras that react to sound and a cube you can throw and that you need to carry to the end of each short puzzle.”
This is a side effect of YouTube content creation practices where a video will have an overview of the plot or story to pad out the run time or article. Often, because game journalism is basically long distance abusive relationships between the writer and the game publisher, the review is too mild to contain actual opinions and will draw on comparisons to other games instead of forming genuine critiques and admiration.
The end result is a generation of games and movies where the review is unable to provide enough genuine content to fill 10 minutes or 3 pages, so they instead spoil the game while riffing on very specific foibles. They don’t know how to talk critically about mechanics or story or design.
I pretty much stopped watching videos like that. “$Game story EXPLAINED” but actually it’s just a 30 minute rehash of the story without anything added to it or explained by the content “creator”.
Sometimes the game itself doesn’t really tell you what it is. That’s not completely shocking.
It’s because sometimes I just want to “rate” the game, not “review” it but steam won’t let me. So sometimes I just write “it sucks.” or sometimes some random shit. Steam should have a idk 5 star rating system with optional reviews. Makes more sense but shit games will be bought less I bet.
There’s this very nice template you can use to quickly make a more detailed review without having to write it all yourself. You can always just google “Steam review template” to find it.
That template is part of the problem
Why do you think so? I feel like they’re some of the most useful reviews I come across.
Cherry picking here but what use is this category when it lists the required size right on the store page?
It just makes it impossible to provide any nuance related to the elements of a review. It’s not just important to say “audio is very good”, but also what makes this audio very good. Everyone has a different idea of what good and bad means, rendering a bunch of biased multiple choice questions mostly useless for readers
I know, but these suck
Just let me rate 1-5 and leave a wall of text if I want to
I find myself reviewing way less now. I’m mostly playing on the Steam Deck. And they want me to type a essay with a controller? Nah.
This is what I hope it is. There’s way too many joke reviews. I don’t want to see review bombs get silenced because they are very informative when I’m not in the know about a particular developer/game’s situation. I don’t want to buy games that are outraging players. Chances are, I’ll be one of the outraged too if I give them my money.
Good. I’m sick of seeing the “pet this cat” reviews at the top of the list. Hopefully this changes some of that stuff.
5,000 Steam awards on the “review” too.
To be fair, what else are those points for other than blowing on awards to dump on reviews and guides?
I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.
It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.
But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.
Some review bombs are for legit reasons. I’ve seen a few for games that dropped support for a language well after release.
Wasn’t it helldivers 2 that region-locked people months after release?
Over 130 countries.
You mean the last game anyone anywhere ever bought from Sony?
Is it even review bombing if it’s for a legit issue with the game in question?
In my opinion, the question comes down to “what is a valid criticism”. I think the bombing part, where a lot of people give a similar negative review at the same time is secondary.
If a game releases in a borderline unplayable state this warrants negative reviews. It shouldn’t matter how many of them there are and if they are all in a similar time frame. Same with an update that harms the game a lot. If this makes the game change the rating from positive to mixed or negative, I think that’s fair because if I buy the game now, I will get it in the most recent state and if this is shit I don’t care if it was better at some point in the past, I’m glad if I get a warning through the reviews.
If the game gets negative reviews because a person/group related to creating the game said or did something that a large group of people disagree with it’s more complicated. It boils down to if you can/want to separate the art from the artist and if you find that criticized thing bad in the first place. If you don’t think this is a valid criticism you probably think this “review bombing” is a bad thing.
I think the term “review bombing” is used to imply that the criticism has nothing to do with the game itself. But like with all terms, the usage becomes broader and broader until it changes or loses meaning completely.
Since Steam reviews contain written explanations it is easy to check why the game gets the negative attention. I never came across a game that had a lot of reviews for an unrelated thing where almost all the negative reviews lied and said it was bad for gameplay reasons.
they already have a system for review bombing. i hope this is for stupid “joke” reviews that say nothing about the game but regurgitate the same fake review for the 1400th time.
I don’t have a direct quote, but I remember reading a few years ago that valve was debating how to handle bombing. They said something along the lines of not wanting to silence the bombers, but to highlight it so it was clear it was a review bomb. I got the impression they were considering things like showing the unusual spike of reviews in a different color. This sounds like it might be the results of that.
They already have something for it, when I look at a review bombed game it specifically tells me that theres been unusual activity with the reviews. I believe you cna choose to hide or show the review bombs in the settings somewhere.
Ah got it. I didn’t realize. That sounds exactly like what I remember.
If I’m grokking the feature correctly, people will have to review bomb the review bombers with “unhelpful” flags.
I’ve never discovered review bombing over steam. Either my peers mention it to me or I see it on social media.
Though to be fair, almost all of my decisions about buying games are made from watching videos of said game, rather than reading reviews. Steam reviews, for me, are either for very cheap games I’m buying impulsively or games where I have some insight but am still on the fence.
I used to read Rock Paper Shotgun as part of the decision making process, but I’ve found their input less useful the last few years.
If a game isn’t overwhelmingly positive, I almost never buy it. I also find review bombs completely valid in almost every case and I’m not interested in funding games that have managed to outrage their player base. In every case I would be outraged by the same thing they are.
It personally depends for me but this mark means at least says something in general about the quality.
Take a look at games like Gta5 when Take2 tried to ban modding (lol).
You can now review reviews
Yo dawg…
Slashdot nailed this decades ago.
has it really been decades 😭
Always could
You could only not mark a review as helpful. You couldn’t provide context if the reviewer didn’t allow comments.
Does this mean “reviews that negatively affect profits” or does in mean genuinely removing irrelevant content?
You can mark a review as helpful. If it’s that, then users decide about it.
It probably works based on whether users marking reviews as helpful or unhelpful and then uses some formula to remove the unhelpful ones. So it can be neither, but the key takeaway is that the users decide what ends up filtered out.
Thanks. That’s actually not too bad an idea. However, I’ll offer that it could lead to critics being silenced. Not necessarily out of nefarious purposes, but people love the downvote train sometimes.
Yeah, that’s why I said it’s neither because people can be unpredictable. It might not filter out irrelevant content because people love to upvote memes and it might filter out criticism because sometimes people downvote criticism.
Overall like with some other Steam features the value of the feature is dependent on the community, and generally that value has been a net positive.
All good points.
For the same reasons that the YT algorithm is deliberately mysterious, Valve shouldn’t be letting people know how to game systems like this.
I would hope that it’s removing that one review about being a 40 year old dad that plays the game with his son that’s on every single game in the Steam store. And also hopefully that copy pasted one with the check boxes
Asking the real questions.
This is a good change, they have had the unhelpful/helpful/funny review system for years now, but I always found it weird it didn’t do anything aside from boost on “helpful” rating. something that is majority unhelpful rated shouldn’t be shown on the review page or arguably in the score in the first place.
Speaking of unhelpful, eurogamer.net is littered with ads. They add no value to the original Reddit post (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1emb4ch/valve_is_finally_addressing_bad_reviews_issue/).
Really good change. Filtering out “funny” reviews are what everyone’s thinking of, but I hope this also gets rid of those dumb reviews where people just fill out a long form rating everything 10/10 just because they like the game.
How I feel about your comment: 1 - it’s ugly 2 - meh 3 - the graphics are okay 4 - it’s pretty 5 - OMG it’s like real life!
5/5
I wish they would also let us filter out unuseful guides.
PROS
- I can write a list
- It will be a few lines
- I can fluff it up a bit
- Keep going
- Almost there
- It’s an okay game
CONS
- I’ll write 200 of these
- Most will be nitpicky
- I still played over 1000 hours
- I clearly have never written a line of code yet somehow know how they could have done it better
- I should be paid as a game journalist
3/10
at least these reviews are more informative about a game than the “just leaving this cat here” for thr billionth time
Eh. I mark people complaining about core elements of the genre or similar stuff that’s a clear valid design choice as “not helpful” if it’s whiney enough sometimes, but at least they’re talking about the actual game.
For every like I will eat a spoonful of salt
Reviews being a message board for grievances and memes really sucks. It reflects badly on gamers. Makes everything look trashy.
Memes? yes!
Grievances? That’s exactly what a review is for! Telling other people what you do and don’t like about a thing.
I wonder how many real reviews are going to get filtered as “unhelpful” because the developer or other people don’t like what the review says, even if what is said is factually true.
One problem steam doesn’t have is with fake accounts. They can be reasonably sure which accounts are legit and ignore votes from the more questionable ones
Or fanboys going through all reviews and downvoting any negative reactions. I’m willing to bet folding money that Hollow Knight’s user score is going to go up because of this because their fanbase is toxic af
Please just give us a “maybe”
Who will review the reviewer?
