Alan Wake 2 looks a lot better, though. From the article:

> As a comparison similar hardware in Alan Wake 2 — which was released the same week as C:S2 and is considered by some to be the best looking game of this console generation — reaches comparable average framerates with all settings cranked including path tracing, either at 1440p without any upscaling magic or at 4K with some help from DLSS. I think that’s a good illustration of how bizarrely demanding C:S2 is.

I love CS:2, but it does run noticeably worse than every other game I have (using GFN's RTX 4080, which normally never lags) with outright stutters lasting a few seconds at a time, interrupting whatever I was doing. And it does that without looking really any better than its predecessor. And even if you turn down all the settings, it still lags quite a lot.

I think most people playing city builders don't necessarily demand super-next-gen graphics, but performance that can keep up with the growth of their cities.

I still gave CS:2 a positive/thumbs-up review, but I can understand why so many people are frustrated with it. Launching with such a limited number of building options and no editor or mod support was also kinda a let-down. Still, I'm excited about the foundation they've made in 2, and think that it'll be awesome in a few years' time.

This is why steam reviews are nice. It's fine to review something negative out of the gate and review it more favorably once it's in better shape. This helps other people more than rating it positively.

Yeah, I love the review score histogram over time feature too, along with the "Overall reviews" vs "Recent reviews" summaries.

I wish there was a way to discount the first month of reviews from the overall score. I assume that the people who buy, play, and review the game immediately are the super fans who have extreme views on what makes the game good.

There is! You can click and drag on the review date graph to any custom timeframe you want. Then it'll calculate the overall rating of just your selected date range for you.

I wish I could post an image here for you :( But basically just go down to the reviews, expand the graphs (with "Show Graphs"), and click and drag a box on the left hand one.

Alan Wake 2 performs well on PS5, and I haven’t encountered any “game breaking bugs” (about 3/4 of the way through). There’s no conspiracy, it’s a fantastic game.

Some reviewers stand up to this kind of stuff (sometimes at great cost). You can choose to follow and support those reviewers. But the general rule is to simply never pre-order stuff.

Gamergate, to a certain extent, was indeed about ethics in game journalism. It just got hijacked into culture war bullshit like everything else.

But who cares? As long as the sheep keep preordering the music won't stop.

GamerGate was pure unadulterated juvenile misogynistic right wing culture war bullshit from the start, and had absolutely nothing to do with ethics or game journalism, and everything to do with intolerance and harassment and misogyny and abuse, and you know it, so stop trolling.

Regardless of what you think, anytime you talk about games journalism, even a decade later, you risk falling into the horrible black hole. Successful poisoning of the well.

I just don't bother with reviews anymore. Stopped reading every gaming website except Gematsu (which rarely reviews) and I follow certain niches of you tubers to see if a game has the right pulse. If I wanna know how a Sonic Game is, why not peer into various sonic you tubers instead of trust which IGN reviewer won/lost the straw?

Maybe you fall into black holes and believe misogynistic conspiracy theories all the time, but I don't.

They only successfully poisoned your well, you didn't have to drink the GamerGate kool-aid and declare it a success, because most people in their right mind who aren't misogynistic sexually frustrated incel teenaged boys or angry right-wing Q-Anon man-children can see through it, and don't believe that unmitigated bullshit.

There's nothing special about game journalists. Most journalists have always been bought and paid for, but not the way your GamerGate conspiracy theories claim.

If you needed Milo Yiannopoulos to "open your eyes" to that for the first time, you weren't paying attention and have been living under a rock or in your mother's basement, and you're getting your bullshit and conspiracy theories from somebody much much worse than game journalists.

How do you even look at yourself in the mirror after lying to defend GamerGate? Why do worries about ethics and game journalism compel Q-Anon freaks like you to attack an old man and try to murder him with a hammer?

Pelosi hammer attack accused David DePape tearfully testifies of bizarre plot:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67411189

Giving evidence for more than an hour on Tuesday, Mr DePape said his political transformation started when he was living in a garage without a toilet or shower, playing video games for hours at a time.

He said that in the course of looking up information about video games he became interested in Gamergate, an anti-feminist campaign that targeted prominent women in the gaming world and became a huge online trend starting in 2014. He began listening to right-wing podcasters and watching political YouTube videos.

"At that time I was biased against Trump," Mr DePape said, "but there's, like, truth there. So if there's truth out there that I don't know, I want to know it."

He said he formulated a "grand plan" that involved luring "targets" to the Pelosi home.

> makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too.

Agreed. There's such a whole world of unreported 'sponsored' or otherwise products, and streaming is a big part of it. And no-one is immune.

When the cheesegrater Mac Pro came out, I watched a lot of videos on it, particularly on YouTube in the photo/video segment - I was planning to get one, and while I had other uses for it, I'd be doing a lot of photo work on it in my recreational time.

Quickly I noticed just how many of the big name streamers had launch day or very early access to the Mac Pro and Pro Display. Sure.

And then I noticed how each and every one spun it as "I just got mine", "just bought one", and so forth. All organic, they'd have you believe - not a single one said "Apple sent me this". And yet...

By "a curious coincidence", every single one had seemingly ordered the exact same spec: an 18 core CPU, 384GB of memory, the Vega II Duo GPU, and 8TB SSD, and the nano-textured ProDisplay.

So what, you might think, that might have been the quickest shipping order. Also an $18,000+ computer, $25K with the display.

And if you're a photographer, even if you're working on medium format digital, and 100MP images, you in no way shape or form need 384GB of memory, or that GPU. For me, LightRoom / Capture One and Photoshop all barely sweated on my 12 core 192GB W5700X variant.

So then Occam's Razor applies. What are the odds that, even of just the 8-10 streamers I watch, they all got exactly the same spec Mac? Or is it that that was the spec Apple was sending to high popularity streamers?

Except not a single one even implied that that might have been the case. And I don't doubt that many or all bought their own at some point. But I suspect it was mostly "got one from Apple, talked it up, and then substituted it with my own when it arrived".

And it gets worse the smaller the market is: There is a chance that a youtuber with sufficiently large following could actually choose to buy said mac pro, because their revenue might be pretty large. But then you look at, say, boardgame reviews. Nobody, ever, buys a game. But the number of views isn't good enough to dedicate the time to it as anything other than a hobby. Thus, anyone posting enough that they make it their job is also getting sponsored on top of the free product, but nobody wants to tell you that. Thus, all you are seeing is 100% ad, just shaped as a review, or as entertainment.

I've been getting into sim racing lately and a majority of the youtube reviewers do this thing where they claim it's not a sponsored video but the company sent them the product for free. And that's the same problem when it was magazines publishing glowing reviews of mediocre products just so the gravy train of free stuff doesn't end.

Those would be somewhat better if they made a point (I've seen some in the photography world do it with smaller things) of "and after I go through a review, I'm going to give it away to a viewer/follower..."

Hey, it worked for Jerry Pournelle and Robert Scoble ...

it should be illegal imho. You straight up shouldn't be allowed to tell reviewers what they can and can't review

Strong agree. It should be core FTC rulemaking to prohibit this; it's a form of advertisement masquerading as independent review.

(If the subject of the review sets conditions on its content, to restrain the reviewer from discussing their negative observations, it has the character of an advertisement. The subject is enforcing editorial control; thus, they have partial authorship/editorship of their own "review". Either you sign your name to your *ad*, or, the reviewer signs their name to their unburdened conscience—there is no in-between).

What's being described isn't an example of conditions being set on the content of the review. It's an embargo date on when a review may be released, and a restriction of what may be publicly disclosed before the review is published.

There's nothing wrong about that, and in fact forbidding embargo dates would have a pretty bad outcome. It would result in reviewers getting no early review copies, and having to rush out shoddy reviews ASAP after the release. Likewise the customers would have no access to reviews on the release date, and would either need to wait or buy the game blindly.

Internet now is full of non-journalists ("content creators") producing what people substitute for journalism.

> Alan Wake 2 getting phenomenal reviews in the face of terrible performance and game breaking bugs

There is no terrible performance and the game breaking bugs are very rare (as in none of my ~10 friends who bought the game ran into any of them on their first playthrough). Yes it is a demanding game but it is also one of the best looking games ever made.

Yes the game is demanding if you max out everything but as it runs at 30/60 fps in quality/performance modes on PS5/Xbox Series consoles it does run at those (or better) framerates on PCs very easily.

Only case when you get bad performance is when you use incompatible hardware (old graphics cards without mesh shader support)

It's always been like this. Long before streamers got involved. Video game magazines (the paper ones...remember those?) had the same exact process for reviews. Game publishers expected certain things in return for access to future game releases and most video game magazines cooperated.

Every two years or so there was a scandal about either reviewers calling out a game publisher about the bullshit, or a widespread backlash against obviously lacking reviews.

I’m running Alan Wake 2 on an RTX 3080 with a 7800X3D and the first few sections in the forest (don’t think describing forest scenes in Alan Wake 2 is a spoiler here) ran around 30fps, and then the absolutely sumptuous next few levels (man the maps are gorgeous) have been running at 60fps rendered at 1080p upscaled to 1440p.

It didn’t seem like turning down settings caused a huge increase in frame rate so I just put everything to max and man it looks great. So you at least feel like there’s a reason your graphics card is running at 82°C and your fans are spinning up.

On the other hand, my wife was a huge Cities Skylines 1 player and bounced off the game pretty hard, as the low frame rates doesn’t come with any sort of real upside.