Could YouTube reviews be too powerful?

[Stargazer2600]

I may be a little all over the place as I'm typing this out. The truth is I want to get this out while it's still fresh in my head before I start forgetting key things that I have been thinking. 

 

Recently I got my girlfriend to watch you play the Mass effect trilogy. Once I completed it she wanted to play for herself and after that she wanted to play Andromeda. She loved it but was sad when I told her that there was no sequel to Andromeda. Now this is a woman that loves to play fallout 76. She has dumped hours and hundreds of dollars into the atom shop. Watching her play both games however slowly made me start to think about something.

 

Both games were slammed really hard upon release, and so were other games such as cyberpunk, No Man's Sky and others. Now some of the criticism for these games are very valid. But what I want to address is where most of the criticism and reviews for the games come from.

 

YouTube is a large network really of channels and subs. A YouTuber needs subs to flourish and those that sub ordinarily will watch your competition. Your sub may like you more or they may not, but you need to keep that sub happy and entertained. Andromeda suffered from a hate train. When the big YouTubers bashed it the smaller channels followed suit in fear of losing mutual subscribers. No matter how much Bioware tried to fix it, no matter how much the bugs were compared to the original ME1 (which people laugh and enjoy). It was never gonna be enough. Years ago I made a post about this and go further in depth. If interested incan find it and link to it.

 

76 and no man's sky didn't deliver on the promises that they gave. And rightfully so the criticism was deserved. The reviewers came out and slammed the game hard but over the years both games have drastically improved. 76 added a lot of what players asked for but even today and even after being free on ps+ they're quite a few people who won't touch it. They won't touch it because their favorite reviewer told them not to. And just like with Andromeda a lot of reviewers just joined on the train because they were afraid to go against what the bigger channels were saying.

 

I find this as a dilemma. We should know problems with games and we should know if they're good or not. But we also live in an age where games can be improved after release. I grew up with the older consoles where when a game was released, it was stuck that way. There were no patches there were no updates. But nowadays a game can be released and fixed over time. But when it comes to reviews and the community of YouTube that reviews games, they act like we're still stuck in the old days. This in turn can hurt gaming, and it already has. Andromeda completely got canceled out, all DLC that was planned and all future installments are gone. We will never see how that story ends. 

 

And that can be a problem because what's to stop the YouTube community from doing it again? I mean there's nothing they can do to stop a game that's been released. But why would you want to get invested in a game just for YouTube and the reviewers to hate on it and now all the sudden you're not ever going to see how that game ends because all the future games got canceled. 

 

Let's say you like the game called crazy chips. You thought it was really fun and you were looking forward to the next game because they left it open. But the game gets slammed by YouTubers and now that game is not going to happen. I don't know about other people but it's happened to me quite a few times and it's really made me not want to be invested really in any game that involves a story or goes beyond one single game.

 

I know there's another Mass Effect game coming out and most people just say "oh just pretend Andromeda didn't happen" but I shouldn't have to. I get tired of the things I enjoy getting axed or wiped away while things like COD who do the same things every year get praise. Like I said at the beginning, kind of going all over the place here but it really just fires me up that once the reviewers make their decision, then that's it. You can even totally fix the game but it's not going to matter. 

 

It just seems like if YouTube doesn't like your game, you're done. I'd love to discuss this with people. Maybe my personal experiences are stopping me from seeing something but, I just wanted to get this out. Felt good typing it

[Dreakon13]

It's not just YouTube but social media in general.  Right now it's really an unchecked power that the social media mob wields to influence people and hurt developers (or really anyone they disagree with).  Sometimes they get good things done, I'm sure studios behind games like Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man's Sky would've just taken the money and ran if the response wasn't so poor, so at the end of the day we got better games out of it.

 

But it's also taking "the customer is always right" mantra to an extreme where between the No Man's Sky's and Cyberpunk 2077's, the games that really deserve what they got, there's a lot of collateral damage.  People believe as the person spending their "hard earned money" that they have the right really to say or do whatever they want to the people asking for the money, and maybe not realizing (or not caring) their actions have a real impact on the other side in the form of jobs, careers and livelihoods lost for dubious reasons... not even getting into the propensity that gamers in particular have for going after people personally, their families, doxxing and sending death threats.

 

The best thing for any of us to do is just take YouTubers, influencers and the bulk of social media with a grain of salt.  Play games if they look interesting to you and don't worry too much what other people say or do.  It's an unfortunate minefield that developers have to navigate just to share their work with the world most of the time, but it is what it is at this point.

Edited March 17, 2023 by Dreakon13

[DaivRules]

Before YouTube there was a very small cabal of journalist game reviewers that made the same decisions dozens and dozens, possibly hundreds of YouTube game reviewers do now. 
 

The question of if either is too powerful is to ask if people are too gullible… Unfortunately, collectively, the answer is yes. Humans tends to seek out things that reinforce their cognitive bias to reinforce it, rather than question it and seek out things that challenge it.

 

At least in the age of YouTube, there is the possibility after the initial bad reviews to showcase a counterpoint or update review and make the case for people to check things out. So many will see the review scores and cement their opinion, happy to let other people do their thinking and move along. 
 

I’m quite certain done properly, a Bad Review Followup channel that did nothing but play and review games that had generally bad initial reviews, but have had updates would gain a pretty good following. And with a strong enough following, might be influential enough to get some devs to take a chance on resurrecting franchises that got panned. 
 

This isn’t to excuse bad marketing promising things that should never have been promised in the first place. But that’s my problem with games wanting to be reviewed as they are, and not a total review of the developers personally, the publishers history, the franchises twists and turns, the marketing teams blunders, and all the rest of the filler things that get counted as part of a game review. 
 

 

[KingGuy420]

I've been saying this for years. I take issue with reviewers in general. Like if I'm not interested enough to roll the dice, then I'm just not interested enough period.

 

But YouTube does take it to another level. You have a guy like Angry Joe who literally built his empire on anger and negativity. Who now has financial incentive to be a negative asshole cause those are the videos that "perform" the best. Then there's the trickle down of "oh this guy disagreed with Joe? Unsubscribe!!!!". So now smaller reviewers even have a financial incentive to blindly agree with the bigger guys or else their kids aren't eating this week. The whole things a broken joke.

 

You know what they say. Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't do either criticize.

[JPtheNeurotic]

There’s a lot to unpack here but generally speaking , I know what I like and I don’t need to be told . Sometimes someone’s opinion or review or whatever might have me reconsider because it gave me a new perspective but I know what interested me .

 

I learned the hard way back whine I was teen and game informer gave tales of vesperia a 7.5. That’s not a bad score but it seem that based on that review it wasn’t worth bothering with it . Several years later I was hungry for jrpgs and I bought it and it’s like my favorite game ever . 
 

 

[Slava]

6 hours ago, Stargazer2600 said:

But we also live in an age where games can be improved after release.

 

There are too many new games coming out each week. If you missed the mark and launched a broken/empty game, a lot of people will not care enough to check it 5 years later when it's eventually fixed and has content. They will be playing a newer and better game instead. Initial impressions are usually very important. I don't blame people for listening to whatever reviewer they trust and ignoring Andromeda, Fallout 76, and No Man's Sky.

 

I also don't blame people for ignoring reviews and playing these games. Firstly, if you enjoy a game, then the critics don't matter. Secondly, there are YouTubers who farm views by uploading countless videos about video game drama, latest controvercies surrounding broken games, etc. "How Bioware ruined Mass Effect forever" is a very attractive and clickable title. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to discern a normal review from typical clickbait, there's a whole range of this stuff online nowadays.

 

What I blame people for is not knowing how to read/watch reviews. I know it sounds stupid but stick with me here. How many people just watch a random review without knowing who wrote it, what they are known for, what their tastes are, what their videos are? How many people check the score without reading/watching the review? How many people check the metascore without looking at negative and positive reviews and comparing them? I know it takes some time to familiarize yourself with some reviewers, but it pays off. Especially when a game you're interested in gets mixed reception. Even regarding games like Fallout 76, you'll be able to find a level-headed person who covers each update and points out positives and negatives, what's been fixed, and what is still in need of improvement.

 

6 hours ago, Stargazer2600 said:

but was sad when I told her that there was no sequel to Andromeda

 

When it comes to games not receiving sequels, the reason may not be always simple. For example, Bioware has had a million issues internally like mismanagement, crunch, poor leadership, and technical issues (Jason Schreier wrote in detail what was happening). IMO, there's enough people to blame, and the buck shouldn't necessarily stop at reviewers in this case.

Edited March 17, 2023 by Slava

[DaivRules]

16 minutes ago, Slava said:

If you missed the mark and launched a broken/empty game, a lot of people will not care enough to check it 5 years later when it's eventually fixed and has content.

Luckily, we have a whole platoon of people who post on here and elsewhere that they won’t touch a game before it’s 5 years old and as cheap as it’s going to get, so there’s still a massive audience after the initial gotta-have-the-newest-now-I’m-done-what’s-next crowd. 
 

[Slava]

1 minute ago, DaivRules said:

Luckily, we have a whole platoon of people who post on here and elsewhere that they won’t touch a game before it’s 5 years old and as cheap as it’s going to get, so there’s still a massive audience after the initial gotta-have-the-newest-now-I’m-done-what’s-next crowd. 
 

 

True. In my case, it's more like 10-15 ?. 

[Stargazer2600]

2 hours ago, KingGuy420 said:

I've been saying this for years. I take issue with reviewers in general. Like if I'm not interested enough to roll the dice, then I'm just not interested enough period.

 

But YouTube does take it to another level. You have a guy like Angry Joe who literally built his empire on anger and negativity. Who now has financial incentive to be a negative asshole cause those are the videos that "perform" the best. Then there's the trickle down of "oh this guy disagreed with Joe? Unsubscribe!!!!". So now smaller reviewers even have a financial incentive to blindly agree with the bigger guys or else their kids aren't eating this week. The whole things a broken joke.

 

You know what they say. Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't do either criticize.

Actually glad you posted my dude. A few years back on my Andromeda topic you said something similar that kinda stuck in the back of my head and over the years birthed these thoughts and now this post.

 

I don't normally agree with a lot of people on gaming but me and you seem to be on the same wave length 90% of the time lol

3 hours ago, DaivRules said:

Before YouTube there was a very small cabal of journalist game reviewers that made the same decisions dozens and dozens, possibly hundreds of YouTube game reviewers do now. 

 

 

I think I know what your talking about. Wasn't the channel like G4 or something like that?

[DaivRules]

11 minutes ago, Stargazer2600 said:

 

I think I know what your talking about. Wasn't the channel like G4 or something like that?

I'm referencing before television channels covered gaming. In the 80's and into the 90's, there were very limited publications (Nintendo Power didn't come out until 1988, GamePro in 89) covering video games and reviewing them. And all the way into the mid 90's, no video game was covered without directly paying the magazines to cover their games. You can guess how reviews generally went.

In the early to mid 90's several magazines went online and created sites, which again, continued pay-for-coverage video game journalism. Publishers and developers limited their access to their chosen sites, controlling all impressions accessible by the public.

 

G4 was not known for gaming reviews and instead focused on video games as a whole, but the entire channel was envisioned and implemented as an advertising gimmick to let developers or publishers pay to have all their works prominently places throughout programming. The low viewership that eventually killed G4 reflected how well received general TV watchers took to the concept.

By 2010 YouTube established enough regular gaming review channels that we ended up with what we have now.

 

[Ashande]

I don’t think it’s a YouTube problem; it’s a “mindset of the masses” problem… if it’s a problem at all. Reviews, harsh critics and hate trains go all the way back to Greek drama and philosophers, and maybe even further than that. If you do something, someone will always have something to say about it, good or bad, and someone else will say “yeah, I agree with that” whether they’ve experienced the source material or not. Does social media in general - or YouTube in particular - increase the size of this bubble? Yes, but it works both ways. There’s YouTube videos with hundreds of thousands of views defending Andromeda, uncountable comments on negative reviews saying “You’re wrong, Andromeda is great,” and even channels devoted to the concept of reviewing a game after time has passed - sometimes months, sometimes years - to determine if the game’s issues have been “fixed,” whatever that means.

 

All that said, the reviews - positive or negative - existing is not the problem. The problem is people who take a review as gospel truth and never dive deeper into the content, whatever it may be, or who refuse to examine counterpoints so as to reinforce their cognitive biases… and I can’t fault them for that. Picking a reviewer who your views typically align with and trusting them may deprive you of a hidden gem, but it also saves you $50-$70 that can then be spent on something that wasn’t delivered half-baked or that is more likely to be what you’re into. Given the sheer number of games being released and competing for your dollar, and that not everyone has the time or funds to just buy them all, that barometer is important.

 

One thing I think YouTube does better than traditional media sources is, due to the format, you’re more likely to listen to the reasons the reviewer gives for their opinion. It’s not as easy or convenient to scrub through the video looking for the point where they say “4/10, give it a pass” or “10/10, it’s awesome,” compared to just looking at the bottom of the page or whatever - probably manipulated - number Metacritic gives. So you are more likely to be exposed to why they feel that way… which, even if the game gets a bad review, may actually lead you to want the game, because the reasons they cite for their conclusion that it’s bad may not be issues to you, or may in fact be positive points.

 

TL;DR: YouTube isn’t “too powerful,” at least not in any fashion that hasn’t existed for millennia.

[VigilantCrow]

It's 100% like Daiv said, people are just too gullible.

 

Reviewing in general is a joke. People have to lie and pump a game up, or lose early access to future titles. On the other side of the coin, the reviewers who buy games generally have to nitpick and obsessively tear apart games in order to stay relevant. Simply no middle ground when trying to entertain Youtube's child/manchild audience.

 

Best to check out a no commentary gameplay video, see if the mechanics/graphics/whatever you like is appealing and decide if it's worth grabbing.

 

 

 

 

[Vault-TecPhantom]

Lots of really great responses here and I pretty much agree with most of what’s being said.  There are too many grifters making money off the anger of their flock. Every time I see a YouTube commenter telling their fave, “thank you so much! You saved me money and time” it makes me laugh. It’s like, well, how would you know if they’ve “saved you money” when you haven’t actually played the game? For all you know they might have forever just put you off a game you may have really loved.

 

Forspoken was the latest to fall victim to the hate train.   It got to the point where anybody who praised the game in any capacity was instantly mocked or downvoted by mouthbreathers who never even played the demo, let alone the full title. Eurogamer said it was the worst game of the year in January. Folks were even celebrating the fact that the studio who made it had been folded into Square Enix, knowing full well that it most likely meant that some people lost their jobs or, at best, had been demoted. Again, celebrating people losing their livelihoods because their fave told them these developers worked on a video game they shouldn’t buy…

 

It's important to note, though, that while the state of games journalism is mostly terrible there are some good reviewers too. I respect and trust the opinion of content creators like SkillUp because even when a game isn’t for him he tries to consider who the game might be for. For instance, during a time when it had become trendy to talk about the “comeback” of No Man’s Sky he was the only reviewer who questioned whether No Man’s Sky, even in its fully realised form, was a good game in and of itself. In fact, it was his negative review of No Man’s Sky that made me go out and get it because he was careful to highlight who might enjoy it and I just so happen to fit into that category. I ended up loving the game.

 

All that being said, as someone who adores Mass Effect Andromeda - not likes - adores that game I don’t believe it was the hate train that denied it a sequel but rather the “Bioware Magic” that has plagued the studio for years, as others have alluded to above. It’s well known at this point that Bioware has internal management problems which continued all the way to Anthem. Same mistakes, different game. They don’t learn and EA was right to abandon ship as much as it pains me to say that.

 

Fallout 76 is similar to Destiny 2 in that it’s very quietly successful and still making money which is why it’s one of the few major AAA live service games currently going.   Everybody who plays it today knows that it’s good to the point that it’s inconceivable that there was ever a time that you could step out of Vault 76 and not be greeted by those two women. Wastelanders fit so seamlessly onto the foundation of 76 that it feels like it and the follow-up DLCs were always there. Yet we know that this was not the case at launch. At launch it was a disaster. You didn’t even have to play it to know that because anyone who has played a Bethesda game before knows that their games are historically chaotic. There are entire YouTube compilations dedicated to the bugs in that game. One can’t just ignore its history because “it’s good now”. So while I agree that gamers should eventually stop letting outrage merchants dictate the games they play, I don't think conditioning players to expect games to improve over time is healthy either. While there are people like you and me who will wait 1 or 2 years for most titles even if it was critically panned it’s simply not reasonable to ask paying customers to “give it a chance” years later. Maybe if we weren’t so quick to champion comeback stories publishers would stop treating day 1 buyers like beta testers.

 

Ultimately, the lesson to be learned here is that a game should be good day 1, no ifs or buts.  “A rushed game is forever bad” isn’t just a literal statement anymore but a figurative one. No matter how many patches and improvements are released sometimes a game can’t escape its initial reputation and IMO that’s fair.   Todd Howard once said that it’s not about how a game launches but what it becomes. Um, no it’s not. It’s about what it was, what it is and what it shall be. A game should be functional the moment it’s published and if isn’t then, as far as I’m concerned, its bad reputation deserves to outlive it. 

[Eyjabria]

Luckily there are still people who can think on their own and there is life outside YouTube/social media. 

Pokémon Scarlet/Violet got a lot of hate on the internet with people exaggerating its technical shortcomings. This escalated to a point where some people were spewing lies about its features or lack of them, actively trying to persuade others to not buy the game. I personally got the game at launch and didn't find anything wrong with it aside from low animation frame rates on distant NPC models. Instead I got a highly enjoyable monster collecting game that both me and my husband binged on for over hundred hours in a short period of time. It was also my favorite game last year. 
Funnily enough the hate campaigns may have achieved the opposite result that the haters intended, seeing how the game sold over 20 million copies in the first six weeks.

 

Of course in Pokémon's case there's the power of the highly popular IP. Smaller games may suffer a lot from bad publicity - but on the other hand it's still publicity that may lead to people discovering the game and getting interested in it.

[Phlegeth]

"Cute opinion, did a Youtuber give it to you" is a meme for a reason.  People have just been parroting bad opinions forever, but the accessibility of YouTube has just made it worse.  And the accentuate the negative does generate a lot of views.  And sometimes the fact that they're playing a character goes over a lot of peoples heads.  Hell, sometimes it seems they forget they were playing a character and just to negative reviews. 

 

And hate watching gets it into algorithm more.  Cause like everytime Dunkey talks about a turnbased game, it spreads across the internet.  He hates turnbased games.  We know he hates them.  But people keep watching it and then complaining about it.  And then it comes across someone new's timeline and they watch and think the entire genre is shit.

[Stargazer2600]

3 hours ago, Eyjabria said:

Luckily there are still people who can think on their own and there is life outside YouTube/social media. 

Not enough though. If someone like AngryJoe or Gameranx says a game is shit then once the train starts the future of that series is pretty much done, especially if your not AAA

[Eyjabria]

32 minutes ago, Stargazer2600 said:

Not enough though. If someone like AngryJoe or Gameranx says a game is shit then once the train starts the future of that series is pretty much done, especially if your not AAA

 

Never heard of either of them. But I guess I'm not the target audience.

[Ashande]

The thing I think that is being missed is there is always the possibility that the game actually is mediocre or just plain bad. Andromeda was awful at launch, including horrendous graphical glitches, broken conversation trees and progress-halting bugs, and that’s aside from the story being sub-par when compared to the other three games and playing like a janky third-person shooter instead of an RPG with shooter elements like its predecessors. Forspoken is a mediocre isekai open world without enough content to fill it and poorly directed Buffy-speak dialogue, plus has the disadvantage of not really showing off what the PS5 can do… and launching in January, right after a lot of folks got a shiny new PS5 - likely alongside God of War: Ragnarok, Horizon: Forbidden West or Elden Ring, any of which blows Forspoken out of the water in almost all categories.

 

I’m not going to celebrate people losing their jobs or their livelihoods, but at the same time I feel like the issue can’t be laid at the feet of whichever YouTube reviewers a given person does or does not like and how much they did or did not like a given title. Studios have gotten closed down over poorly done and underperforming games for decades, long predating the rise of YouTube, or even any kind of mass market reviews on the subject at all. if you want to keep your job, do a good job. Don’t deliver a mediocre, half-baked game, especially after hyping it to the stratosphere. Don’t deliver a glitchy mess. Take some bloody pride in your work. That goes for the execs and everyone else, down to the last QA guy. People in this industry - or any other creative industry - should know by now that not bringing your A game frequently results in negative consequences, and those consequences are generally fatal; not everyone is going to get a chance to salvage the game - Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout ‘76 and No Man’s Sky have been incredibly lucky in that department - and even if the studio doesn’t close and patches or DLC later address whatever issues there were, time marches on, new games come out, and the hype train keeps plugging away. The game will be forgotten and left in the refuse pile, remembered for that first impression.

[Breakingthegreen]

The thing is that about the over reliance of youtubers for the taste-establishing, is that it's really a problem of psychology the extends much further, it's being part of a community that people are after, and many people (particularly children but that's a whole other issue) think that being a good fan is to be a "Yes-man" and always agree with them. Unless they've been culturing these attitudes, then it's not 100% to blame the youtubers for these people. 

 

These Yes-man attitudes will also extend to fandoms, where the ideas of the correct thoughts take longer to form but given enough time a "Correct" opinion is formed, for example: in the Sly Cooper fandom: Sly 4 is the literal worst game in the franchise, I disagree heavily. In the Doctor who fandom: Flux is the worst series, I really liked this series more than 11 & 12. And in the Danganronpa fandom: Ultra despair girls is awful, I think it had it's problems... in chapter 3, but I still liked it overall.

 

None of this to say having these opinions is wrong, they are opinions after all, but differing thoughts will often be combated by the loudest and most toxic of a community which only reinforces the current status quo. To continue to feel welcome in a particular community, people have to hide or compromise their own opinions and some will even spread these ideas that they don't care or agree with.

 

It doesn't help that most communities look impenetrable from the outside, (I don't play Souls series and the phrase "Git Gud" is enough to make me not bother even trying the games) so people may be to afraid of ostracisation from the communities they are a part of.

 

What's most important is to try and manage your own beliefs, rather than give in to hearsay, or peer pressure. Scott the Woz saying that Shadow of the Tomb Raider is as good as the other two games in the trilogy: Fantastic, I don't agree though. hbomberguy saying that Sherlock is poorly written and explains himself well: very convincing but I watched it again recently and still really enjoyed it. 

[Vault-TecPhantom]

2 hours ago, Ashande said:

The thing I think that is being missed is there is always the possibility that the game actually is mediocre or just plain bad. Andromeda was awful at launch, including horrendous graphical glitches, broken conversation trees and progress-halting bugs, and that’s aside from the story being sub-par when compared to the other three games and playing like a janky third-person shooter instead of an RPG with shooter elements like its predecessors. Forspoken is a mediocre isekai open world without enough content to fill it and poorly directed Buffy-speak dialogue, plus has the disadvantage of not really showing off what the PS5 can do… and launching in January, right after a lot of folks got a shiny new PS5 - likely alongside God of War: Ragnarok, Horizon: Forbidden West or Elden Ring, any of which blows Forspoken out of the water in almost all categories.

 

I’m not going to celebrate people losing their jobs or their livelihoods, but at the same time I feel like the issue can’t be laid at the feet of whichever YouTube reviewers a given person does or does not like and how much they did or did not like a given title. Studios have gotten closed down over poorly done and underperforming games for decades, long predating the rise of YouTube, or even any kind of mass market reviews on the subject at all. if you want to keep your job, do a good job. Don’t deliver a mediocre, half-baked game, especially after hyping it to the stratosphere. Don’t deliver a glitchy mess. Take some bloody pride in your work. That goes for the execs and everyone else, down to the last QA guy. People in this industry - or any other creative industry - should know by now that not bringing your A game frequently results in negative consequences, and those consequences are generally fatal; not everyone is going to get a chance to salvage the game - Cyberpunk 2077, Fallout ‘76 and No Man’s Sky have been incredibly lucky in that department - and even if the studio doesn’t close and patches or DLC later address whatever issues there were, time marches on, new games come out, and the hype train keeps plugging away. The game will be forgotten and left in the refuse pile, remembered for that first impression.

 

"Mediocre" and "bad" are subjective qualities so, again, it's important to note the potential target audience. I personally have no issue with the dialogue in Forspoken and think the reaction to it was way overblown. Outright telling your audience to not buy a game simply because it's not to the youtuber's personal tastes is just bad journalism since it's not taking into consideration that there is someone out there who will like it. Many of the YouTubers didn't even get codes for Forspoken (the ones who were leading the hate campaign on it before it even launched) which means they went out and bought a game they knew in advance they wouldn't like just so they crap on it and be part of the conversation which is corny as hell.

 

Graphical glitches and broken conversation trees are objective qualities so it's fair to not recommend the game at launch since, by definition, it's non functional/unplayable. I don't know how I would feel about Andromeda and 76 today if I had played them at launch but I'm glad I didn't. Again, while it's a shame people lack the critical thinking skills to consider the possibility that a game with a bad reputation is being overlooked by their fave in its current state I can't blame them. Bioware and Bethesda are repeat offenders. Get it right the first time.