Confirmed: Sega are not issuing review codes for Sonic Forces

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

3 hours ago, Dejimon11 said:

Here's there reasoning for that

 

That's starting to sound like an awfully crucial day 1 patch. Like,  even more than just what the psych info suggests. 

Yeah. Sonic Forces is looking dandy but I cannot stand hefty Day 1 patches when they could just as easily be avoided by delaying the game.  >_<

[CleverSonicUsername]

10 hours ago, Rummy said:

Steam.

You could try refunding the game once it goes live. Just list the reason as having received a code for the game prior to launch but after your purchase, I can't imagine they wouldn't give you your money back. I've put "THIS GAME STINKS" as the reason for my request a few times and they've always granted it, so I'd find it hard to believe your situation would merit any real scrutiny.

Edit: I should have read ahead to see this was already suggested, but I'm pretty sure the applicable refund period begins after launch. In any case, it's worth a try, just to see if you can. Steam is pretty good about processing refunds quickly so you should know the day of.

[Yuluga]

2 hours ago, Jovahexeon Cala Maria said:

That's starting to sound like an awfully crucial day 1 patch. Like,  even more than just what the psych info suggests. 

Yeah. Sonic Forces is looking dandy but I cannot stand hefty Day 1 patches when they could just as easily be avoided by delaying the game.  >_<

the update of day 1 came out yesterday ... not the launch day of the game

[Shaddy Zaphod]

2 hours ago, Jovahexeon Cala Maria said:

That's starting to sound like an awfully crucial day 1 patch. Like,  even more than just what the psych info suggests. 

Yeah. Sonic Forces is looking dandy but I cannot stand hefty Day 1 patches when they could just as easily be avoided by delaying the game.  >_<

Ordinarily I'd say this is stuff that was just overlooked until after the game shipped, but it's weird that you need an update just to play as Super Sonic. They couldn't have just forgotten him, so what's the deal?

[DoubleXXCross]

5 hours ago, Mad Convoy said:

I don't see why its necessarily a bad thing to let people inexperienced with the genre review a video game? Especially when there are multiple reviewers, two of which are fans of the genre. If a game is to get high marks, then it should be able to appeal to genre fans and non-fans alike, otherwise the game has overly limited appeal (which is a valid thing to try to warn people about and deduct points for).

And if they got to review for a professional magazine, then they are professionals. The basic definition of professional is somebody who gets paid to do a task as opposed to doing it as a hobby. Most professional game reviewers either got into it because they like money or because they're gamers themselves, usually the latter.

Not sure here but you're kind of implying that Famitsu uses 8 reviewers when it uses 4????? Unless you're simultaneously saying that the reviewers are chosen entirely at random and also picked from a pool of two genre fan reviewers and two genre non-fan reviewers (which doesn't really make sense???? I am not insulting you, I honestly do not know what you mean). Actually, reviewers are assigned to games they aren't interested in all the time and sometimes just because you have a bit of time left for your bosses to squeeze in another review. Famitsu isn't the first and won't be the last for a magazine to have wildly inconsistent quality scales. One GI reviewer rated Sonic Generations lower than the Sonic 06 rating given from another reviewer. Three different people rated Unleashed on IGN and each person had a completely different perspective on the game. Metacritic is one of the most trusted gaming review websites on the web, a game's Metascore often treated as the end-all be-all of its quality-- and it sources all kinds of reviews with wildly different standards and even different systems that are hard to compare.

I'm not saying don't use Famitsu or Metacritic or whatever. I just think its mistaken to look at averages as anything but a first impression. The important part is the part where Forces got 9/9/9/8 scores from four reviewers thus far-- making the mode of the four scores 9 (which is more accurate considering that the 8 is an outlier in this set). What's even more important than that is the actual content of the reviews. Even then, only treat reviews as a good way of getting a general idea. They are not the end all be all. I can see where the attitude came from-- in the days before the internet and post-Atari, game reviews in magazines used to be the only way of getting honest information about games before and after they came out to decide if they were worth purchasing. But that's not the case anymore and I think a lot of gamers' relationship with reviewers need to be re-evaluated, especially since the consequences of a game not getting the desired score can be flame-y on a scale I don't see with movies, TV shows, etc. that face a similar lack of desired score.

Actually, I would be curious what the mode score of each Sonic game is. For the less divisive titles it might be more accurate than the average. This is the kind of thing Metacritic is good for so I might get a bunch of numbers from there and check it out.

Where did I imply more than four reviewers to a single review?

What I mean is Famitsu literally contacts four random people from the Japanese populace to give brief opinions with a number score and then tallies the number. They can be of any age, any profession—including way out of the range of Famitsu's general readership, such as the elderly—and technically don't even need to play video games often or, because of the non-genre slots, at all. The only unifying traits are "two play this sort of video game" and "two don't". It's actually a pretty good way of demonstrating that scoring games wildly is a hobbyist thing and that normal people can always get around sticky controls or bad writing or software crashes (see 06's near-universal 7s); but it makes comparing Famitsu game scores to one another very difficult, because it will be literally four different people for every game—or even the same game if it were scored multiple times over multiple releases. We don't know how these random people are given the review copies, or for how long they're able to play them, and we never actually get a view of their broader opinion, or the ability to compare said opinion to their opinions on other games because the chance any one of them will be able to submit a comment twice is extremely low.

Taking a sample sounds good, sure, but here's the thing: samples only work if they're large, which is why proper aggregators that balance both dozens of professional reviews (people who look at a lot of video games) and take submitted opinions (a lot of people who look at video games) are more reliable for first impressions than single reviews or blurbs. I mean, if I were to take a four-person sample of the American populace and ask them how many believe in the moon landing, it isn't going to select itself perfectly in proportion with the results of a larger survey. I might pick up four people who all equally believe the moon landing was a hoax, even though a 1200-person survey offers less than ten percent.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

12 hours ago, Rummy said:

I pre-ordered it weeks ago and by now it's not refundable from what i've known, Whatever the case i bought it and i might as well live with it for another day.

From what I understand, pre-order games on Steam are cancellable up until the day it releases. The reason people couldn't refund Mania was because SEGA gave out the free copy of Sonic 1 which Steam counted as technically being the point of play.

[Red Hot Jack]

2 hours ago, Yuluga said:

the update of day 1 came out yesterday ... not the launch day of the game

So there is another update going live on launch day?

[Salamander]

If the Day One patch is already live, then using it as an excuse to not deliver review code until launch seems like simple sophistry, though I suppose it may not be ready yet for every platform.  But I agree with the above:

6 hours ago, Jovahexeon Cala Maria said:

That's starting to sound like an awfully crucial day 1 patch. Like,  even more than just what the psych info suggests. 

Yeah. Sonic Forces is looking dandy but I cannot stand hefty Day 1 patches when they could just as easily be avoided by delaying the game.  >_<

If this patch is so crucial to the experience of playing the game that it's not possible to provide an accurate review otherwise - then shouldn't the game just have been delayed?  As noted, people have already finished it, no patch required.  Did they get a substandard experience?  Did they not play the "real" Sonic Forces?

We're actually going to have to watch another full playthrough after the game has come out in order to compare it to the pre-release version, if we're being told that the latter is so unrepresentative.

[Yuluga]

1 hour ago, Jack the Rookie said:

So there is another update going live on launch day?

surely it's just that the output update

[Jovahexeon Jax Joranvexeon]

4 hours ago, Yuluga said:

the update of day 1 came out yesterday ... not the launch day of the game

So then, it sounds like there's another update on the way if that's the case.

[RK64]

Well, some key things to take note of. Some animations are blatantly unfinished; using the wire/hook to drift in the Tag-Team stages looks very off (Sonic doesn't move at all; locked in place) and Modern Sonic has no idle animation. To small things but when Modern has a free-falling idle animation but not his basic one? That's off. 

[Sr101]

Odd, that Polygon has a review up today... but didn't receive a review code... Did they buy a leaked copy for their review? Bias much?

[A235]

4 minutes ago, Sr101 said:

Odd, that Polygon has a review up today... but didn't receive a review code... Did they buy a leaked copy for their review? Bias much?

5/10. 

Oh. This game flops.

[Sr101]

Anyone else find this suspicious? Read the review seriously and tell me it reveals anything new about the game we all haven't been bitching about for months.

 

I legit don't believe they played it, based on what I've heard from people who already own copies that were leaked.

[Meta77]

1 hour ago, Sr101 said:

Anyone else find this suspicious? Read the review seriously and tell me it reveals anything new about the game we all haven't been bitching about for months.

 

I legit don't believe they played it, based on what I've heard from people who already own copies that were leaked.

dude its polygon. like kotaku they are far from being a large reason to care. If you want to guy buy it. Do not let someone that all they do is play games for 2 days to get a review up as quickly as possible. I hold famitsu to higher praise than them.

[Monkey Destruction Switch]

1 hour ago, Sr101 said:

Anyone else find this suspicious? Read the review seriously and tell me it reveals anything new about the game we all haven't been bitching about for months.

 

I legit don't believe they played it, based on what I've heard from people who already own copies that were leaked.

Just to be perfectly clear, please don't discuss this baseless and ridiculous accusation in this thread either.