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Just a quick reflection, but something I wanted to run past the community. More and more as I've gotten older, I've found that critics and reviewers of games, movies, books, shows, etc. have been getting less and less useful as guides to what I'll enjoy or find interesting/beautiful/inspiring. There's no single pattern, but to give a couple of examples, in videogames, I often find high-rated AAA titles quite shallow, soulless, and needlessly time-consuming, whereas I have a real soft spot for AA games that may be a bit janky or have dated graphics but but have real creative vision and create an immersive world. In cinema, it's something similar; I find contemporary superhero movies and the recent crop of Star Wars films to be extremely uninteresting, mainly because I find it hard to take their narratives seriously and get immersed by them - they feel more like rides at an amusement park than a serious attempt at worldbuilding and storytelling. Similar patterns apply for me in TV and literature, and these days, I'm wary of entertainment products that score incredibly highly with reviewers, and am more interested by those that have a wide spread of love-or-hate-it reviews and/or a big gap between critic/user scores.
I don't think it was always this way. I've always been a big reader of gaming magazines, for example, even as a kid, and I also tried out a huge number of games by renting them from Blockbusters and similar. There, the review scores were remarkably predictive of my enjoyment. And to this day, I can't think of many cases of truly great games on the Megadrive/Genesis or N64 (my main consoles as a kid) that were panned by critics but adored by a good chunk of fans. And I remember from roughly 2002-2010 thinking that Rotten Tomatoes was basically godlike, pretty much always accurately predicting how impressive I'd find a movie.
I'm interested in what's causing this. Four quick hypotheses.
(1) It's just me. For whatever reason, my tastes have shifted so they're no longer aligned with the dominant standards of taste among reviewers. Maybe this is just because of idiosyncratic ways my tastes have evolved (hypothesis 1a), but a related possibility (hypothesis 1b) is that whereas I used to be more agreeable and subconsciously attempt to align myself with critical opinion, tricking myself into aligning my opinions with theirs, in recent years I've become more contrarian, so that the placebo-pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and I now make a point of actively trying to dislike popular stuff.
(2) It's not just me, but it's a predicable generational effect. My positive experiences with reviewers started to change when I hit my late 20s and became a dad, thereby shifting marketing demographics significantly. Reviewers' standards of taste are very much aligned with 18-30 single consoomer demographic, but more weakly aligned with people who fall outside this group. If this were true, then I'd be curious to know, e.g., which 90s films resonating with my current demographic but panned by critics I might be able to retrospectively enjoy.
(3) Reviewers have gotten shitter because of corruption or politics. This is one I'm sure we've all been waiting for! It's a common opinion in many places that reviewers of movies, games, shows, etc. have either become very corrupt (1a) and/or have sold out to woke interests (1b) in a way that is not predictive of the experiences of mainstream audiences. If either of these were true, we'd expect a growing gap between critic and user opinion as measured by e.g. rotten tomates, metacritic, or Steam scores. I'd love to see data on this.
(4) Media markets have fragmented along taste lines, so reviewers - through no fault of their own - have a tougher job making recommendations. This is a tempting one for me, not least because it paints an optimistic picture of an era of cultural plenty, and it certainly seems we're awash in more varieties of content than ever before. If this were true, then we'd expect to see a growing standard deviation in review scores for art, games, and entertainment, as reviewers found themselves in a period of cultural continental drift and began drifting away from each other. I'd love to know if this is true.
What do others think? Does my experience resonate? Is it an age effect? What hypotheses am I missing?
Reviewers are also beholden to market forces, since everyone wants the first scoop and can't piss off a publisher by negatively reviewing their games as that might risk not getting an invite to the next game. That might be one reason you find their recommendations worse - they can't really call out a game for its bullshit if it means not getting to keep their jobs.
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It occurs to me that at least (1) and (2) are testable: your present self can go watch some old movies & play some old games that you missed at the time. Maybe throw in some stuff from before your era (there's lots of goodies on the NES) to calibrate it further. Possibly with a partner to pick out a good sample of good/bad/middling offerings without biasing you by knowing their review scores.
I think (3) is mostly explained by (4), at least in video games. There was indeed a fragmentation, along mass market vs hobbyist lines. The defining feature is that hobbyists (defined in an interview that I can't currently locate as 'people who own 10 or more games') both have different tastes than the mass market and are hopelessly outnumbered by them, to the point of becoming a rounding error in the last decade. Both the AAA games industry and the big gaming journalism outlets live or die entirely by mass appeal - a few tens of thousands of units moved or clicks harvested aren't going to keep the lights on.
(As an aside, I think the decline of ink & paper gaming magazines had a big role to play - those viable even back in the day when only hobbyists were interested, while gaming websites have been able to attract wider attention) For their part, a good chunk of the hobbyist crowd has become openly hostile due to this marginalization, which does little to endear them to the big players that could be making an effort to include them.
This wouldn't really be visible in critic/user review score deviation, as critics would be expected to be 100% mass market and user reviewers would be an unpredictable mix of both. That said, I personally already use a system to 'correct' Metacritic scores to be more predictive for my own (hobbyist) tastes:
(average of User Score and Critic Score)+(user score)-(critic score)
I'll definitely try that formula! I just plugged it into Terminator: Resistance (a game that I've been massively enjoying of late, but which got mediocre reviews) and it came out at 91%, which matches my experience.
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I have a novel hypothesis / wildly unfounded cloud-yell on this: we are seeing a shift away from stories and towards content.
Let's take your Star Wars example. Original Star Wars was supposed to be a childlike fairy tale, and there's nothing wrong with that (see C.S. Lewis). But it had some kind of coherent sense and consistency. It had the Hero's Journey. Its creators imagined a world and told a story of what happened within it.
Contrast Modern Star Wars. What is it supposed to be? It's certainly not a fairy tale, and it's not even really much of a story: there's no internal consistency. Characters don't really do things for reasons: Luke Skywalker almost murders a child not because there's any way that makes sense, but just because the Mentor needs a Dark Secret. Rey wants to redeem Kylo Ren not because she has any personal motive to do so, but because we need a Redeemable Villain. The world doesn't exist as a fictional setting: stuff just happens, the First Order appears out of nowhere, the Republic vanishes, now the Final Order exists, now it doesn't.
What it is is Star Wars content. There are people on a screen with lightsabers and blasters and spaceships - are you not entertained?
Just so with current-Phase Marvel. Does anything about Thor: Love and Thunder make a lick of sense? Does it have a solid plot? No - but look, Thor is here! And Valkyrie!
It's not really about it being for children. There are plenty of good stories for children: some of the best stories are age-agnostic. Great literature is not necessarily particularly highbrow or intelligent: Shakespeare and Homer were optimising for making good stories, not for showing off how clever and grown-up they were.
But it is really reminiscent of the rise of streaming as a phenomenon: when you watch a stream, there's no narrative, no coherent set of ideas coming together, just stuff happening. It's easy to procrastinate with it and to have it on in the background because it's not a story, it's just stuff. And so with a lot of modern cinema. No stories, at best a couple of Big Moments (that you can React to and talk about on Twitter!) strung together with content.
In the case of modern social justice versions like Star Wars, or the elements of Love and Thunder that come from the SJ-based comic, there isn't internal consistency because the people writing it have other priorities than internal consistency. At best they'll put a little in without paying much attention to quality, at worst they'll do things for other reasons that actively hurt internal consistency.
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Speaking primarily about video games, because that's where I'm most familiar:
I think your item 3 is a big part of the puzzle, possibly the biggest. Reviewers nowadays seem less interested in games and much more likely to have undue incentives then they used to be. However, since that's been discussed by other replies a lot I'm going to focus on an element I think is relevant that hasn't been mentioned yet.
I think a part of the decline in review usefulness is the shift away from reviews being a product of a single person and towards reviews being the product of large publications.
I've found the most useful reviews focus on how an individual saw the game and how much or how little fun they had with it. If the reviewer decides to rate the game lower because of some minor element that seriously detracted from their game experience, that's perfectly okay as long as the reviewer makes it clear so readers who might care less about that element can take the score with an appropriately-sized grain of salt.
Nowadays, at least for the bigger names in games reviews, it seems like the intent is to put out an objective score. I think that has led reviewers to stop looking so much at their level of enjoyment with the game, and instead focus on non-opinion criticisms. This way of reviewing games feels like reviewers start with a default of a perfect score and take points off for flaws, and "I didn't have much fun" needs to be translated into an objective flaw or it can't be used.
This kind of review tends to favor big companies that produce technically well-done games that are lacking something hard to define over ambitious smaller studios whose games have significant flaws but really nail the critical part of their product.
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I think it's almost certainly 1 is the main one. If you've played an Ubisoft game, you've unlocked all the temples or regions or whatever. You don't need to play it again. Ubisoft's audience hasn't played an Ubisoft game yet. The audience of a mainstream reviewer has played, like, Minecraft and Fifa and maybe, I dunno, what do kids play these days, Among Us. You've played enough games to develop taste and you're old enough that you're no longer impressed by the shallow experience of AAA, and that's ok.
And it's really the same thing with Marvel/Starwars sequels/etc. These are movies to entertain children.
Welcome to the underserved market: actual adults. Luckily with adult responsibilities and hobbies I don't have time to worry about watching marvel films and playing every AAA game that comes out. One good AA game per year is fine for me.
How to pick stuff in a world where reviewers are no longer smarter than you? Well, you need to do your homework. Find creators you like, like a director of a movie you liked or the studio that made a game you like. Find other stuff by them and their friends. Ask your friends what they play.
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I think it's 4, but inverted. Markets have fragmented a bit, but it's more important that reviewers have. The value of being part of a larger organization has shrunk for someone who produces reviews, fiction, and some journalism. In the past you had to be part of a larger organization like a newspaper to make your work happen. But now people who can earn on their own increasingly do. For example, I like dumb fantasy books, and I'm suspicious of new authors in the genre who aren't self-published. Established authors get a pass because the publishers were the only game in town when they started.
The larger organizations increasingly consist of people who can't make it on their own, but have a talent for reading the room. If you only follow their work it's going to feel like the quality of work has deteriorated.
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To focus on games specifically, while games journalism's, uh, changes over the past decade were a reckoning with the tensions between being actual journalism and being simply a consumer's resource, I think a lot of the challenge of figuring out what's a good buy or not has been fulfilled by new internet reviewers--people like MandaloreGaming, the late TotalBiscuit, Gmanlives, Jarek, and so on. I imagine other media have their own equivalents. The challenge is finding notable and trusted reviewers.
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I can't speculate on your particular scenario, but for me it's a combination of 2 and 3. First, there are lots of games I still like which just don't match up with the dominant tastes of today. Or, at any rate, what are thought to be the dominant tastes of today. The games industry is insufferably trend-driven and the big companies will routinely ignore opportunities because the executives have convinced themselves there's no audience for a game that doesn't follow the trends. But regardless, lots of people love things like FF being an action game series for the last 20 years, or Mass Effect going from "RPG with shooter elements" to "shooter with RPG elements". I just don't have the same tastes as those people, and that's OK.
Second, reviewers have indeed gotten shittier. Many games journalists are embedded in, and true believers of, SJW/woke/progressive/whatever you want to call it culture. Hell, I can scarcely think of any people in games journalism that aren't true believers in that ideology. And that tends to be reflected in their work. You can't go to any of the big sites (Gamespot, Kotaku, Polygon, etc) without getting a review that is driven by politics first, and game quality second. It's why I quit reading all those outlets, because I was sick of being preached at. Add onto that the straight-up corruption (e.g. Gamespot firing Jeff Gerstmann for daring to give an advertiser's game a bad review), and there's this huge problem where even if you agreed with the reviewer's tastes, you couldn't trust that they were being honest with you about the game. Unlike the previous paragraph, this one is not some benign case of "we differ and that's OK", but there's nothing I can really do about it either. I just have stopped listening to those people.
This has been the case since at least the 90s. Rascal is a PS1 game that is widely touted as one of the worst on the console, largely due to the godwaful control scheme -- imagine trying to play Ocarina of Time but with tank controls. And the camera is told to be behind the character and can't go outside the room, so if you back up against a wall the camera is just squished between the back of their head and the wall. And if you rotate the camera into a wall it stops moving but the character doesn't stop turning, so eventually your controls reverse.
Why would the devs do such a thing? Well, the publisher told them to. Why did the publisher tell them to? Because Tomb Raider had tank controls. And Tomb Raider was very popular! So people must love tank controls! So put some tank controls into our goddamned game! No we don't care that the render engine requires the camera to be inside the rooms at all times, just fucking do it! And so...
I would say it's been the case in the industry since forever. I recently read The Ultimate History of Video Games (great read btw). One of the things which stood out to me in that book is that even in the Atari days, it was pretty much a pattern of "one company innovates, lots of people imitate". It just is a fact of life, I suppose.
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Are Star Wars and superhero movies really what you consider as the peak of contemporary mainstream critical value? I would be more interested in hearing your opinion of big budget prestige movies like Knives Out, Inception, or even the Christian Bale Batman movies.
I would also propose an alternative reason for less useful critics, which is that it simply is not as essential to tell me how good a movie is anymore. I am generally just going to watch it at home on my astoundingly good, cheap TV. People don't read reviews to know whether a movie is worth their $20 anymore, but to get an explanation of plot/themes or, more, as a conversation with other fans of the movie or movie's source material. Of course, this applies mainly to movies; games of course still cost money, and TV shows now more than ever require a decision on whether a shows justifies a la carte streamer X.
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It's almost certainly (3). Reviewers back in the day used to be enthusiasts, gamers with a passing interest in writing. Now they're wannabe op-ed writers with a passing interest (sometimes not even that) in gaming.
This is simply because of more money being involved in gaming. Per geeks, MOPs and sociopaths, gaming got big, people became aware money was being spent and therefore there was money to be made and prestige to be claimed, and so in came the sociopaths to harvest as much of it for themselves as they can.
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I don't have any data for this, but my understanding as a kid in the 1980s was that during the print media age, critics were misaligned with the 18-30 demographic but skewed older. Critics were often dismissive of youth-oriented programming and favored adult-aimed material that many young people considered stiff and dull. I'm not in-tune with gaming journalism, but followed movie criticism closely as a teenager. I was the weird kid who loved both the movies aimed at me but also wanted to see Akira Kurosawa's Ran, because the critics praised it, and watched anything rated 4-stars in the weekly TV section of the newspaper. This meant watching new movies like Ghandi and Out of Africa, and old movies like Ben-Hur, etc. These were "old people" movies. The popular movies might have been skewing younger but the critics were lagging.
With the death of newspapers and rise of digital journalism, I think that critics have either gotten younger or are consciously aiming at that younger readership who look for movie talk on Twitter but never would've read a newspaper had they been the same age in the 1980s.
Maybe this is where you find yourself misaligned: as younger person, you had a taste for the more mature media favored by old critics, and as you've gotten older, the critics have become less mature.
This really rings true to me. I had a broadly similar taste profile as a teen, enjoying weird and esoteric but critically acclaimed stuff regardless of recency (example: I took my ever proper date to watch Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, a 2.5 hour film spoken entirely in Inuktitut, just because I heard it had good reviews from critics. I don't even live in Canada). Similarly with music.
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Personally, I've pretty much always thought this, that most critics opinions about movies and other media bear little resemblance to how much I'll enjoy it. I don't think it's just me being contrarian because I don't really pay enough attention to reviews to even know what the "mainstream" thinks of it. I think that everybody has different interests for things they like to get out of a movie, so there isn't much value in a critic just saying this thing is good or bad. It's more useful when somebody says things like, this movie has a lot of cool fights and explosions with a weak plot, that one has a sweet love story, the other one has a complex and dramatic storyline, and the next one is filled with lowbrow humor.
I do wonder to what extent people who say they go along with critics are just going along to be agreeable and fit in with the "mainstream".
I also think there's a thing going on where there's some kind of cost disease thing going on in all media types, so mainstream studios for them tend to gravitate more highly towards things that they are very confident will be universally enjoyed around the world and be less willing to try something new or offbeat.
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I think the null hypothesis for all discussions relating to media preferences should be stated explicitly: you form your media taste when young from a variety of sources (included but not limited to critics), and then retain them for the rest of your life, slowly become more-and-more alienated by contemporary media and criticism. It's not your fault, it's not their fault, it's just the natural way of things.
OTOH, games have changed much.
Back in the 1990s, games were played mostly by kids of rich people or those with computers, so more likely professionals.
It's reflected in e.g. complexity of AAA games now and then.
Compare Baldur's Gate to Dragon Age.
DA is maybe an order simpler to figure out.
These days, there's now an entire 'second tier' of games made for the demographic that used to be the main games playing one, because all the big franchises got dumbed down.
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Obviously 3, but I wouldn’t express it in terms of corruption or selling out. It’s the totalitarian politicization of everything. Most critics afaict now believe their role is to judge movies for their supposed effects on society, not technical skill or the viewer’s personal enjoyment.
They’re not really reviews in the old sense, more like the stamp of a political commissar, similar to those advisory ratings for christian parents that simply subtract points for any cursing, kissing and not doing homework. Only the checklist goes: Are DEI casting goals achieved, oppressed classes portrayed positively, does it raise awareness of important political issues, do the oppressors get their comeuppance, etc.
A parallel with advertisement that may explain the woke capitalism phenomenom is the trend towards extreme identification of the consumer with his product. As Ed Norton says, ‘what kind of dining set defines me as a person?’. You can’t just like a good movie artia gratis, it’s serious business now, your self-image, and with it, the world, depend on it.
If you can manipulate people into defining themselves by their consumption choices, you get very motivated and loyal consumers. Similarly, you want your voters to be invested in your ideology with every fiber or their being, no decision too small to be left to personal quirks.
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I think critic scores have also become a less accurate predictor of my enjoyment over the years. I would attribute this to my taste being in a sort of inchoate state until my mid-20s or so. I was still trying to figure out what I enjoyed, and was a lot more susceptible to suggestion. There were cases where I forced myself to 'enjoy', say, Bjork, or Henry James, or The Night of the Hunter, because I felt like they were things I ought to like, for reasons of tribal identification. Liking works that were critically acclaimed was a way to signal my erudition. As I've gotten older, I've become less insecure. I like what I like. Some of what I like is "trash", and that's fine. I'm not trying to impress anyone with my Letterboxd.
But the whole idea of giving cultural artefacts numerical scores (and aggregating them into a single Metacritic/RT average) sort of hinges on the simplifying assumption that these works vary along a single axis of "goodness", and that your enjoyment of a work is a function of where they fall on this scale. This has always been a laughably crude simplification. Consider the category of the cult classic, a work which turned off most audiences but which has a small group of ardent admirers. How do we account for why I love the critically panned Mommie Dearest? Maybe we just need to add a noise term to our linear model to account for these sorts of random fluctuations? Except these deviations don't occur uniformly at random. If you know that I love Mommie Dearest, you should greatly increase your predicted probability that I love Showgirls, and Valley of the Dolls, for example.
The qualities that affect your enjoyment of a work of art are many-dimensional, and different people differ widely in terms of which regions of that high-dimensional space they enjoy.
The role of reviewer is becoming outmoded now that we have technology to move past the simplifying assumption of a universal, one-dimensional scale of quality. For example, we have collaborative filtering algorithms driving the ubiquitous "Users who liked X also liked..." feature, and other, more complex recommendation algorithms. Social media has also made word-of-mouth transmission a lot more efficient. No matter how niche your tastes, you can always find people who share them somewhere on the internet.
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Lately my best hint that something is worth watching is if the critics hate it, but audience love it on the tomatoes. So far is reliable signal.
The problem with modern critics is that most of them are people that just don't know how to have fun with the media they review.
Take a look House of Dragons and The Rings of Power. Both have toxic fandoms but because House of Dragons is polished turd unlike the The Rings of Power which has much weaker everything - people just leave it alone.
But The rings of power being pushed above its station is the current woke project because it ticks the ideological checkpoints.
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There was a good writeup about that, years ago, probably in Russian, that I can't find now. Basically it's that niche journalism, and especially platforms like Kotaku and Polygon, is just testing grounds for Big Boy journalism, a place to polish and prove your wordcel technical chops and lack of squeamishness in producing essay-like content on a given topic. It's like being a technical writer before becoming Ted Chiang or Neal Stephenson – only an uninspired one. Would you, as an aspiring wordsmith, want to dedicate your life to anime reviews or video games, or do you hope to grow up into an Atlantic or New Yorker superstar who's paid well, gets invited to parties with Important People, and makes the world a better place with his blathering? Not much of a question, is it. And accordingly, many game journalists have disdain for their effectively captive audience with those infantile interests; and extreme distaste for more grassroots commentary that chips away at their relevance.
The same logic partially applies to creatives (writers and even designers) in big name studios.
Some links:
https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/Blog:Top_10_Worst_Things_Game_Journalists_Have_Ever_Done
https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/cjs1g3/worst_game_journalist_moments/
But as for the specifics of the transition from enthusiasts to careerists – that's harder. Maybe it has something to do with the dynamics of publishing houses buying gamers' outlets.
Another aspect is that AAA games have become inherently more «soulless», and the same is true for movies. The latter can be partially quantified by paying attention to the share of expenditure that goes towards advertising. Inflation-adjusted advertisement costs seem to be stable. Production costs are only stable or growing if we don't adjust for inflation, like here. The obvious inference is that studios are becoming more reliant on advertisement (I suspect there are better sources on this), which must have corrupting influence on the reviewer/moviegoer ecosystem. An in games: for example, bloggers must compete for receiving pre-release access to publish their piece ahead of time and get their share of clicks in the fast-moving attention economy, so they've got to be on good terms with studios. Concrete case of how this turns out in practice: meh game Metroid Dread getting 88% on Metacritic with 124 reviews, while the crowning achievement of the genre, Hollow Knight has 90% with 27 reviews (recently it was 87% with the same review count, I have a screenshot; not sure what changed).
Now there's also a concerted effort to «groom» fanbases, build franchises... the structure of movie industry as an environment for producing art, even just mass commercial art, is unraveling into streamlined revenue pipelines. But that's the normal stuff of a hyper-optimized economy (I think there was a good substack post on that).
There's an alternative, maybe parallel take to this I think. J-school has been horrible for journalism across the board. It's that, instead of being Subject Matter Experts, be that Subject Matter anything from local politics to tech or whatever, people are just taught how to write more broadly. It's become an upward mobile, hierarchal structure, at least much more than it was in the past.
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One of the great blackpills about the whole GamerGate thing was the realization that "if they're going to do this just for vidya, how corrupt is Serious Journalism?" Then 2016 happened, then 2020, and you know all the rest.
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I know more than a few people who have been Finnish games journalists and never really have showed an interest in other forms of journalism. Some of them of course moved on to other non-journalism-related jobs, but that's pretty much expected from a low-paying field like games journalism.
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I think a big effect that happened over the last 10-20 years is that niche, "nerdy" media like video games have become more mainstream and thus reviewers are targeting a different demographic. No longer are they targeting weird, mostly male nerds, but more like Joe Average, which means their content is less useful to people like me. That also explains why I find most modern AAA games boring and why I still find useful information from people and creators who are more like me.
I really notice that when playing older games from the "golden age" of PC gaming in the late 90s to mid 2000s; they are often more mechanically complex and have much more complex plots than modern titles, simply because that is something players appreciated at the time and appreciate less now.
So yeah, I think it's mostly demographic shifts in who consumes this kind of media which drive this.
What games are you playing these days? I've noticed the polar opposite, that games are getting far more complex and intricate today. I can't name a single game released >20 years ago that reaches the complexity of modern EU4, and even mainstream games like Destiny 2 have way more build variety and moving parts than shooters back in the 90s or early 2000s.
Maybe the Capitalism series? It's on GOG, it looks complex, but it is just about economics (but then, aren't most 4X/Grand Strategy games about that, really?).
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I'm a big fan of both EU4 and Civ 4.
EU4 certainly is complex but a lot of the complexity is kept separate from each other part, like you're playing 10 little minigames.
In EU4, you start building workshops once you get admin 6. You build them on the highest production-value provinces, then you just spam them everywhere once you get more production efficiency. More money - more workshops - more money. All you need to do is go to the macro-builder and it will tell you exactly which provinces will profit most from a workshop. There's a synergy with manufactories in the sense that you always need a workshop to go with the manufactory. There's a synergy with the economic idea group that everyone ought to get (because it's the best even post-nerf I think) because one idea reduces construction cost for all buildings by 10%.
In Civ, you can build forges in your high production cities when you get Metal Casting (sooner if you choose to beeline it or later if you're focusing on other tech). Some leaders have the industrious leader trait that makes them cheaper, plus they're better at building wonders so forges become more a part of your playstyle. You need a Forge to build the Colossus in a coastal city, so terrain becomes an important consideration, especially on Archipelago maps where the Colossus is very strong from all that water. On the other hand, you might not have copper, so you probably won't get the Colossus and can prioritize other things. Forges let you get engineers, which are important for getting Great Engineers for wonder-building and eventually founding corporations. So there's also a potential synergy with the Philosophical trait, which lets you get more Great People. Forges give you more happiness from gold, gems and silver, so there's more geography to think about. But they also cause unhealthiness, reducing your maximum population. That needs to be countered with Aqueducts, farms and food resources, maybe trade. And of course, you need to get a certain number of forges across your empire to get the Ironworks for your most productive city! So you'll have to make some forges in worse cities by the time you get Steel to fill out the number.
Civ 4 links 6 or 7 things together in fairly sophisticated ways. There's always more than just raw cost-efficiency going on. You'll never see a Civ 4 tech that only grants +250 governing capacity. They all open up options that change a bunch of other things and lead to other techs.
EU4 has hundreds of moving parts that usually only add or subtract to a bunch of stats.
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EU4 is complex? I've heard people complain it's dumbed down compared to some or other Victoria game.
IMO, something like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri seems equally complex. EU4 has a million almost inconsequential policies and % modifiers that if combined in the right way can have some serious effect, but it's almost like they don't want to you find out because it takes ten hours before it gets apparent in the game.
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"Forever games" can reach an unbelievable level of complexity, and they didn't exist (EDIT: as much) in the 90s. MOBAs, MMORPGs, arena shooters, strategy games, heck even Minecraft.
I think today's forever games are less engaging, though, because people engage with their complexity mostly by learning "the meta" that someone else discovered by rote. The standard advice given to HOI4 newbies is to watch five hours of tutorial videos that teach you how division templates and combat calculations work. In the 90s you would dive into a game and parse it for yourself.
It's true that it's basically impossible to have secrets in video games in the age of the Internet. People claimed up and down that Sonic was a playable character in Smash Bros Melee, and the rumor persisted for years, but in these days it would never gain traction. Similarly, easter eggs for most games are thoroughly well-documented to the point where if you want to know the secrets of a major game, it's typically just a Google search away. However, this applies to playing old games in the present day as well, as their secrets are just as exposed to the Internet as the secrets of modern games are.
My point is that modern forever games are so complex that it's implausible or at least unpleasant to learn to play them on your own. A late 90s game like, oh, Fallout or Morrowind for example, you can have a pleasant time muddling through the middling level of complexity and mastering it on your own. This learning process was what I really loved.
Modern games are like making a choice between doing a worksheet of fifth grade math problems with fancy graphics OR going through the Khan Academy course for multivariable calculus with a tutor giving you formulas to memorize.
The Internet has effectively outsourced tutorials for some games. Some of this is a natural progression of some games being so complex that watching a Let's Play is the most efficient way of learning. On the other hand, some of this is just lazy devs knowing fanmade wikis will document enough stuff that they think tutorials are a waste of time.
That said, I disagree on the characterization of modern gaming being a dichotomy of ruthless complexity vs braindead simplicity. There's plenty of games in the middleground. The Total War games are one example. Slay the Spire is another. Terraria is yet another, although it's certainly an offender of the "outsource the tutorial to the wiki" phenomenon.
sure, but none of the games you listed are "forever games", I don't think. Have you played Path of Exile, or Warframe?
I've beaten PoE twice (with years in between), and never needed to look things up. If you're just getting to
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EU4 and Destiny 2 are niche games.
Mass games are the creeds, cods and similar.
Destiny 2 is anything but niche. According to this MMO population website, it's within the top 10 most played MMOs (currently number 7 at time of writing).
EU4 is more niche but is still fairly well-known. It's typically within the top 50 most-played games on Steam.
Both of these points are sidetracks though, because OP's post wasn't comparing the CoD of today to the CoD equivalent of the 90s. Why would you? If you want in-depth games with complex mechanics, then you should be looking for those specifically, and modern gaming has way, WAY better options in that regard than the 90s or 2000s.
Honest mistake - i was thinking about the Divinity games.
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MMOs are themselves not the most popular genre of game. WoW had 12+ million subscribers at its peak, but it's far from its peak, and to the best of my knowledge nothing has even come close to WoW success since then. Being #7 of MMOs is not exactly a wildly popular game. I think "niche" is a bit too harsh of a term, but it's not big either.
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The first reviewer I really ever followed was Wesley Morris when he came over to Grantland. I hate read all his reviews and articles and basically thought he was a race hustler who saw everything through the lens of race - but God damn he was really interesting! I finally knew why people used to hate listen to Howard Stern. When Grantland died I basically stopped following him (anyone remember Grantland? - I feel it was the Internet's last mainstream experimental hurrah) but I still remember and occasionally read some of his stuff.
I think most reviews nowadays are trash. Places like IGN are clearly paid for the top games to be positively reviewed and I can only imagine the movie sites are too. Oddly enough every few months I Google something like ' best metal album of so and so ' or ' metal bands with chick lead singers ' and I'll read some articles on cool sounding websites - I've been doing this for decades now it seems and I can't even say if I've gone back to the same site twice ... So many metal sites! They all seem basically how I remember them 25+ years ago.
For most reviews, and this includes LetterBox which I got into for a few years, it's wading through woke bunk. I just find it disinteresting. God forbid I want a review about a fantasy book. Although funny enough I read a review for Children of Time that made me pick it up and it involves communist female led space spiders and I think it's fucking fantastic - about 75% done with it. So you never know.
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(1c) - You've come to know yourself better: When you first started consuming media, you had no frame of reference. Everything was new, so reviewers were giving you useful information about whether you might like it. As you built a library of experiences, you gradually surpassed the critics (who must tailor their message to the general public) and became an expert on your own tastes.
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I have not noticed any particularly sharp decline in the usefulness of reviewers. I find Metacritic to be pretty accurate in terms of overall quality as long as I control for which genres I like, e.g. an action film with an 80/100 on Metacritic is something I'll almost certainly enjoy since I like action films, whereas a Coming of Age Drama with an 80/100 is something I almost certainly wouldn't enjoy since I don't like those types of movies.
If you're looking at individual reviewers instead of aggregators, it's important to find a reviewer with a taste profile that roughly matches your own. I have a few for video games and they've consistently given me good recommendations.
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Consider products from other markets. Do you align with reviews of those or are you always off?
Personally I seem to be i broad alignment with reviews of shows and games coming out of East Asia. These are products covering a wide range of genres, artforms and cultures and yet reviews, even from westerners, seem to be broadly accurate while they miss the target in the west.
This isn't even some nerd thing either, it isn't nerds that are watching Korean romance dramas on Netflix...
I would therefore argue for 3 with a splash of 4. Media markets have fragmented and some things are only attractive to specific audiences which makes reviewing harder. It is also true however that reviewers (and producers!) have gotten worse for reasons related to corruption, politics and financing.
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Eh, my solution was to just find specific reviewers who have consistent criteria on how they rank games, movies, etc. and other media.
When I say consistent criteria I mean someone who won't rank a Marvel/Star Wars/Disney film highly just because it is popular and will, likewise, rate certain films highly even when they're unpopular or otherwise derided by the mainstream, and will apply the exact same logic in each case.
Once I get a feel for how such a critic determines their ratings and where their 'biases' lie, and I'm relatively certain they're not a shill, I can usually transcribe their opinions on a given work to my own tastes and figure out how much I would like a given film based on their ratings.
For movies, once I've heard input from YourMovieSucks, RedLetterMedia and TheCriticalDrinker I can VERY accurately predict how much I'll enjoy a given film. Each has different tastes and each is very thoughtful in how they approach their craft, so if all of them like a film its probably a damn good one, and if they all notice a particular flaw or strength, I take that as a sign that the movie is, in fact, flawed or strong in that way. Then I can exercise some personal judgment.
Of course, there's some irony in that after I've imbibed all of the above's opinions I've very possibly used more time up than if I had just watched the movie.
I don't know of many consistent reviewers for video games, but yahtzee from escapistmag is at least entertaining and, I believe, actually finishes his games before opining.
Basically, if you can find a decent reviewer who puts out regular content and thus can act as a reliable yardstick/compass, hold them tight.
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In the past, if these hobbies were niche enough then the reviewers were hobbyists. Now, reviewers are journalists. A journalist's hobby is more like writing, and less about the domain one is writing about. (Compare: a programmer who wants to program something, but doesn't have enough domain knowledge to make a useful program). You can tell from all the articles that are vaguely game-related but the game is a backdrop for the article's actual thesis. Or, lots of "game reviews" that have flowery language that you can tell it's written by a communications major.
On the other hand, the game journalism I consume the most is for one game, by some guy, who actually plays the game. The content is brief, detailed, and the interpretation and analysis passes all smell tests. It's clear that they aren't just trying to fill some word quota for money.
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