Guess the Metacritic Score - GT7 Edition

[NICKname]

Yes there's clearly more of those than giving a game 0/10 solely based on an optional mechanic.

/s

I didn't know that always-online DRM, a deliberately awful in-game economy, and an awful, tiny career mode are optional mechanics?

 

[Imari]

I guess - I probably should have been more clearer by saying how low must the score be to force PD to rethink again and actually start paying much closer attention to the player base. If anything - the pre 1.07/1.08 version was somewhat acceptable and the metacritic score was more around 6.5/7 or something like that. I don’t think the “apology” is much of a reaction in all honesty but we can only hope for the future of GT7.

Score alone won't do it. The point at which it dipped below about 4 was probably enough to send the message. We now wait to see what the response will be. The score going lower is unlikely to change anyone at Polyphony or Sony's mind - either they can see the damage that's already been done to the brand or they can't.

Given that I saw a post from the Chocobo GP devs giving more information than we got out of Kaz, I'm not holding my breath.

 

[cjr3559]

Speaking of Metacritic, this reminded me to update my four year old GTSport rating from 5 to 6.

 

[NICKname]

It's at 2.0 currently, let's see if we'll get a sub-2 score today.

Well, it's at 1.9 now.

 

[Griffith500]

All I know is that less of a backlash, fewer issues, and a massive level of communication and post go-live support that turned Driveclub around didn't save either than IP or Evolution Studio from Sony's axe.

I suspect however that PD are a lot better insulated, they shouldn't be, but I think they are.

The difference now being that Polyphony / GT cannot cannibalise its own sales in the genre and doesn't duplicate the remit of another first party title.

And as Codemasters EVO discovered, playing in the big leagues means pandering to expectations, not innovation (although like the concept of a "Driveclub" in itself, Onrush's mechanics probably did look more engaging on paper, even though everyone wanted Motorstorm again). This is similar to other mass media e.g. modern mainstream "cinema". It's a difficult tightrope to walk given the investment risk if nothing else.

Similarly, being singularly visionary didn't save Studio Liverpool (Psygnosis) either, but that's a whole different kettle of corporate fish again.

I fully expect the metacritic score will be disregarded as a social experiment (clearly the game with it now is to see how low it can be pushed) and PD will continue to PD and Sony will be happy with the sales and visibility for its ecosystems. Although we do finally get that human drama, huh.


I personally won't defend the always-on decision, although it's been there since the PS3 era in some respects, just not as debilitating when the network went down.

And I fully expect the microtransaction situation will mature nicely once Sony gets enough conversions, as it did in the PS3 era also.


For everything else, take it at face value I guess and, just like the metacritic user reviews state: temper your expectations accordingly.

 

[RikkiGT-R]

LMAO.

 

[Akwaaba]

I think it is time to bump this thread, rather than to make a new one

Yesterday, on Metacritic the user score rating for GT7 dropped significantly. I remember seeing 5.4
Today, at the time of writing this, it is down to 3.0
1,958 negative, 118 mixed and 685 positive
Most of the recent ratings are over the last 24 hours or so, with a score of zero.

I wonder if Sony and PD care about this, and if they do, if this will make them reconsider their plans
I also wonder if this will impact future GT games?

Metacritic

Replying to my own post, because I was interested in the change, of a score that, apparently PD does not care very much about. Or are unable to find ways to develop some positivity among the more vocal dissatisfied users.

Overall score down to 1.8

Positive ratings, increased by 202 to 887
Mixed ratings, increased by 36 to 154
Negative ratings, increased by 3,427 to 5,385
But this represents a really small proportion of the entire player base

I really didn't expect any gift as a result of the servers being down, nor any more than a message from Kaz. However, it does seem as though PD have got themselves into a rut, and I'm not sure that they have the capability to get themselves out. Someone mentioned Driveclub in an earlier post, who ended up with a great game, despite a difficult start. I do wonder if we are seeing the beginning of the end for Gran Turismo.

 

[mynameis66]

So if PD sort some of the issues out does that mean the metacritic score will go up?Or is it forever doomed at the bottom of the list.Ive never used MC as a factor in deciding to buy a game or not so dont know how it works,does Sony keep and eye on this score?Over on the latest news and discussion thread somebody posted that Sony keep there eye on this.

Oh, it's a big thing of last days. MC is Metacritic. That's the site Sony managers care a lot. If game has low score they just kill the franchise. And user score could be important too. Big fail was TLOU2 and about 50k of negative scores. It's a good source of info too.

 

[Johnnn]

So if PD sort some of the issues out does that mean the metacritic score will go up?Or is it forever doomed at the bottom of the list.Ive never used MC as a factor in deciding to buy a game or not so dont know how it works,does Sony keep and eye on this score?Over on the latest news and discussion thread somebody posted that Sony keep there eye on this.

Sure, it could go up, it's like Steam. And 5k people is very small game base. We have MC and many articles, the game is in big troubles now. I am not saying who causes it but that's current fact. You can solve it easily.

MC user score is important to me. If somebody says GT7 has bad graphics, he must be dumb or using bad console or both. You need to find correct info there and decide if it's a problem to you.

 

[BossBattle]

I fully expect the metacritic score will be disregarded as a social experiment (clearly the game with it now is to see how low it can be pushed) and PD will continue to PD and Sony will be happy with the sales and visibility for its ecosystems. Although we do finally get that human drama, huh.

I disagree with this. I have seen a few people saying Sony is going to ignore the criticism and forge ahead. Let me put it this way: The only guaranteed way to kill this franchise is by acting like people aren’t outraged by the decisions they’ve made.

Personally, I want this franchise to thrive, but a real acknowledgment of the complaints with a real plan to fix them (even if the actual fix takes a little while) is really all they have to do.

Polyphony’s tone-deafness is what has truly baffled me through this process. There were essentially no updates throughout the outage. The apology we finally got was almost backhanded corporate speak for “deal with it” —which further incensed fans.

This isn’t going to be an overnight fix, but honestly a genuine apology and acknowledgement of what is being discussed on metacritic, various social websites, and the media would show good will. If they don’t take the time to do that, then unfortunately customers have a right to no longer support this franchise.

I don’t want this to happen, but this is just “Corporate Communications 101”. Thumbing their nose at this level of backlash would not be good.

They haven’t posted on their social channels for a week (as of the time of this post). They know what’s going on. The ball is now in their court.

 

[RikkiGT-R]

If they handed over game direction to me, I could fix GT7 in a day (taking longer of course to actually implement my changes).

It really isn’t difficult, I could make GT7 epic and so could all of us. How PD have failed so hard has me utterly baffled.

 

[MatskiMonk]

So if PD sort some of the issues out does that mean the metacritic score will go up?Or is it forever doomed at the bottom of the list.Ive never used MC as a factor in deciding to buy a game or not so dont know how it works,does Sony keep and eye on this score?Over on the latest news and discussion thread somebody posted that Sony keep there eye on this.

I don't expect anyone that created an account just to leave a zero rating just for one game will bother amending their review later, especially given the varying motivations.

The more time goes by, the better GT7 is going to get, so I think the disparity between the MC score and the game itself is only going to make a Metacritic score seem more and more useless.

 

[nickg07]

Why can't the major reviewers change their reviews too and add extra pressure onto PD?

 

[NLxAROSA]

Given that I saw a post from the Chocobo GP devs giving more information than we got out of Kaz

Acknowledges problem, acknowledges their own role in problem, says exactly what they're going to do about it. 👍

Kaz is merely doing a variation of "You're holding it wrong". Backfired back then, backfires today.

I think the disparity between the MC score and the game itself is only going to make a Metacritic score seem more and more useless.

Scores themselves mean very little. But disparity between critic reviews and customer reviews is usually pretty interesting. See also Rotten Tomatoes, etc. In many cases, it's the only weapon the consumer has.

 

[RikkiGT-R]

Why can't the major reviewers change their reviews too and add extra pressure onto PD?

Because they’re afraid of being blacklisted by Sony and not getting any further “review copies” of games.
Since these sites depend on getting their reviews out early (pre-release) to encourage clicks/traffic for ad revenue, they hold back the truth even when they know a game is awful.
Sad but true.

 

[Imari]

Why can't the major reviewers change their reviews too and add extra pressure onto PD?

They shouldn't change their reviews, the reviews are a fair assessment of the game that they were given to review.

They should do re-reviews with the addition of microtransactions and a fuller transparency around the structure of the economic system in the game.

I think that would better highlight the disparity between the game that Polyphony tried to sell everyone before release and the game they actually gave players.

 

[Famine]

Sad but true.

Sad maybe, but definitely not true. It might be how influencers work, but it's not how journalism works. Anyone who doesn't tell the truth about a game because they're scared the studio might not send them any free stuff or invite them to things any more isn't a journalist.


Our review reflects what we reviewed - the game at v1.04. It wasn't until v1.05 that the microtransactions were revealed in full (we all knew they were there, because the game reminds you of it repeatedly, but we didn't know they'd double in price from GT6), v1.06 broke the licences and downgraded a bunch of particle effects (and I'm pretty sure frame rates are less stable since 1.06) and missions a week in, and v1.07, two weeks after launch, was the one that comprehensively arseholed it. It's fair to say that v1.08 isn't what we reviewed.

Nobody should ever go back and change a review (you never used to get the chance to, because you can't edit a magazine that's already in the shops), because it rewrites history. If we suddenly drop the score two points because of the graphical downgrade, the increased grind, the 34 hours offline, the awful MT pricing, we're pretending that our review two days ahead of launch accounted for the following three weeks somehow - and all the people posting happy comments about it subsequently in the thread look deluded.

What people should do is draw attention to the changes. We've been doing that... and you can count on an article in the not too distant future that reflects the changes to the game.

If they handed over game direction to me, I could fix GT7 in a day (taking longer of course to actually implement my changes).

It really isn’t difficult, I could make GT7 epic and so could all of us. How PD have failed so hard has me utterly baffled.

Even if you were in charge of game direction, you won't have the final say. Meet your new bosses:

 

[Akwaaba]

If they handed over game direction to me, I could fix GT7 in a day (taking longer of course to actually implement my changes).

It really isn’t difficult, I could make GT7 epic and so could all of us. How PD have failed so hard has me utterly baffled.

I guess that many on here will have a few suggestions, that they feel sure will sort out GT7 (as it is now). However, we are missing quite a large amount of significant information to be sure that 'our' changes would be better than PD/Kaz/Sony's long-term strategy.

- We don't know when GT8 is planned for, and which consol this will target.
This determines the lifespan that GT7 needs to last for

• We don't know the player base numbers, either now, or how this is expected to change over the lifetime of GT7. We don't even have the data for GTS to base this on.
• We don't know what content is ready to go, nor what is in the pipeline. We can guess that this will be released to keep interest in GT7 over its expected lifespan, maybe slowing down the releases as the games moves further along its lifespan.
• We don't know what capacity PD have to create more content
• We have no idea about how PD is financed, or how its budget for developing GT7 further is laidout

Without this, I suspect that many would increase the number of events and increase the payout. When more obvious high payouts were available before these got fixed pretty quickly. Selling AMG VGT, and the Nurburgring pit entry are two that come to mind. These incidentally hid complaints about the economy in those games as well. What might be forgotten, is that there are only 424 cars in GT7 at the moment. I guess that most players, who got GT7 on day 1, will have a garage with over a hundred cars in it already. I suspect, this is one of the reasons why the economy is the way it is.

I wonder if, LCD is meant to merely showcase cars that we hope to get hold of in a year or two time? I really cannot imagine that when they were carefully developing this game, PD/Kaz really thought seriously that people will expect the McLaren F1, Porsche 917, etc in their garage right now.

I do think that the economy is flawed, but I think the communication/presentation for the LCD is/was seriously flawed. I suspect that they have developed the game to be a journey lasting several years. Yes, if you are rich enough, then someone can spend millions to buy a real car collection in a relatively short amount of time. But then that model is represented by MTX!

 

[BossBattle]

What people should do is draw attention to the changes. We've been doing that... and you can count on an article in the not too distant future that reflects the changes to the game.

Looking forward to it!

 

[MatskiMonk]

Scores themselves mean very little. But disparity between critic reviews and customer reviews is usually pretty interesting. See also Rotten Tomatoes, etc. In many cases, it's the only weapon the consumer has.

The specifics vary depending on the subject obviously, but generally whether it's a book, a TV show, a film, a game, even a piece of art in a gallery - what it boils down to for me is that weaponising revews to punish a creator because you don't share their vision is wrong, and that's what review bombs are.

They're not objective, and hence are not useful to the public. If they conflict with the creators vision, then there's a good chance they will be ignored anyway, because they were overwhelmingly not constructive comments, and even worse than that, they drown out useful information (or legitimate problems in the case of GT7, where some peoples games are actually broken).

As a slight tangent, taking your avatar at face value, you should be aware of how detrimental derailing a vision of something for the sake of popularity can be... and how good something can be when a creator chooses to face the vitriol of a good chunk of fans and not do what they want.

 

[BossBattle]

The specifics vary depending on the subject obviously, but generally whether it's a book, a TV show, a film, a game, even a piece of art in a gallery - what it boils down to for me is that weaponising revews to punish a creator because you don't share their vision is wrong, and that's what review bombs are.

They're not objective, and hence are not useful to the public. If they conflict with the creators vision, then there's a good chance they will be ignored anyway, because they were overwhelmingly not constructive comments, and even worse than that, they drown out useful information (or legitimate problems in the case of GT7, where some peoples games are actually broken).

As a slight tangent, taking your avatar at face value, you should be aware of how detrimental derailing a vision of something for the sake of popularity can be... and how good something can be when a creator chooses to face the vitriol of a good chunk of fans and not do what they want.

Are you actually reading the reviews…? I did, and there are some troll ones in there, but most of what I have seen were heartfelt complaints that are echoed here on a daily basis.

The media has now picked up the story and is broadcasting that low score out to people who otherwise may not be aware of the situation. These media articles are also noting that fan complaints have some merit.

This isn’t your typical “review bomb” but rather a large group of fans expressing deep disappointment at how a 25 year old franchise has changed for the worse. A quick glance at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter reveals the same sentiment.

They already tried to clarify their vision in the first letter. It didn’t work. Now they have an opportunity to listen to the fans who are passionately requesting changes. I know it seems scary or disruptive, but those who make legitimate complaints are a blessing in disguise. It means that they care and want to see the franchise succeed.

I personally haven’t written the franchise off. Not even a little bit. I think it’s a brilliant franchise with a stellar history. I will happily be the first to applaud them if they fix the game.

As I mentioned before, they have been silent on social media after posting quite regularly. They likely aren’t posting because they know what the comments will look like.

Forza Motorsport 8 is coming out shortly, and it would make strategic sense for Polyphony to make a statement soon before competition can further capitalize on this discontent.

Edit: Would it be wise for Sony to ignore these news stories? Don’t even get me started on YouTube!

 

[Michael88]

90-94, but to be precise: 92. Gran Turismo 4, arguably the best title of the entire franchise so far, got a 89. I really think the game is going to be even better than GT4, it has tons of features a lot of GT fans have wanted to see in the games for years if not decades already. Add a couple early good DLCs and I come up with a 92.

Heh, I can hardly believe I wrote this, I'm usually a pessimist. Looks like I've upgraded to realist.

Man, that didn't age well.

 

[NLxAROSA]

As a slight tangent, taking your avatar at face value, you should be aware of how detrimental derailing a vision of something for the sake of popularity can be... and how good something can be when a creator chooses to face the vitriol of a good chunk of fans and not do what they want.

Yes! Twin Peaks S3 was pretty epic overall; the season finale: chef's kiss. Very much underrated. Typical Lynch. Folks were shocked (though with hindsight not necessarily surprised).

 

[Pizzicato1985]

Yes there's clearly more of those than giving a game 0/10 solely based on an optional mechanic.

/s

That is NOT the sole reason; far from it:

-Only 2/5 of the traditional career/offline mode being in tact as we don't have IB/IA/S races (resulting in a 15hr-20 game instead of 100+ hr like the other numbered entries)

-Always online; we've already seen why this is a cancerous idea, and to add to that, the game has a shelf-life. No going back and playing it 10 years from now. When the servers are shut off, the game is lost forever.

-The poor payouts that turned into mobile-game economy payouts after the credit nerf.

-Highly sought-after game mechanics like engine swaps being locked to a rigged roulette system.

-The absolute snail's pace with which the UCD/Legend dealers update.

-First time in series history we cannot sell cars we bought.

If you think this is just about macro-transactions you've either not been paying attention or have deliberately plunged your head in the sand. This game deserves the critical beating it's been receiving.

 

[Lomic]

This isn’t your typical “review bomb” but rather a large group of fans expressing deep disappointment at how a 25 year old franchise has changed for the worse. A quick glance at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter reveals the same sentiment.

Could not agree more 🙏

 

[RikkiGT-R]

Sad maybe, but definitely not true.

I disagree.
If all those sites like IGN, Gaming Bolt, GameSpot etc told the truth the game would be rated nowhere near as highly as it is now (the gap betweem review sites and actual users who bought the game is hilariously huge).
You can argue that the review sites weren't privy to the MTX prices and what not, but they still had access to the game and would have worked through the cafe menus before doing their reviews. On completing said menus, they would have realised the scant content compared to previous GT versions, and this alone - since we rate games compared to their predecessors - should have seen the review scores much lower than: 10/10! Perfect! Amazing! Essential!

The game is an insult to the series. They knew it. They chose to give it high scores anyway. Why? Nostalgia?
The IGN review, for example, was basically a long list of complaints, but then a 9/10 anyway. Makes no sense to me.

 

[SkyHigh]

give af about a 1.8 rating. Like this game has that value lmao.... Great game with Great gameplay and graphics. Not as good as older GTs still, but better than most games out there just for picture perfect immersive graphics.

 

[R3V]

Sad maybe, but definitely not true. It might be how influencers work, but it's not how journalism works. Anyone who doesn't tell the truth about a game because they're scared the studio might not send them any free stuff or invite them to things any more isn't a journalist.


Our review reflects what we reviewed - the game at v1.04. It wasn't until v1.05 that the microtransactions were revealed in full (we all knew they were there, because the game reminds you of it repeatedly, but we didn't know they'd double in price from GT6), v1.06 broke the licences and downgraded a bunch of particle effects (and I'm pretty sure frame rates are less stable since 1.06) and missions a week in, and v1.07, two weeks after launch, was the one that comprehensively arseholed it. It's fair to say that v1.08 isn't what we reviewed.

Nobody should ever go back and change a review (you never used to get the chance to, because you can't edit a magazine that's already in the shops), because it rewrites history. If we suddenly drop the score two points because of the graphical downgrade, the increased grind, the 34 hours offline, the awful MT pricing, we're pretending that our review two days ahead of launch accounted for the following three weeks somehow - and all the people posting happy comments about it subsequently in the thread look deluded.

What people should do is draw attention to the changes. We've been doing that... and you can count on an article in the not too distant future that reflects the changes to the game.

Even if you were in charge of game direction, you won't have the final say. Meet your new bosses:

View attachment 1127492

Call them out in an article then. No one in video game "journalism" industry is.

Called it kinda.

New SIE CEO seems to be the "quarterly cash grab until you kill the company and parachute out" kind of guy. Every decision Sony has made the past few years has been terrible for playstation owners.

 

[BossBattle]

Call them out in an article then. No one in video game "journalism" industry is.

He alludes to an upcoming piece in the post you quoted.

 

[R3V]

He alludes to an upcoming piece in the post you quoted.

Yeah about the current status of the game, not Sony's new short sighted cash grabbing execs. It kinda isn't GTP's place to write such article, but all media outlets and websites staying quiet doesn't help.