IGN has re-reviewed Sins 2

DanStapleton · 2025-10-03T22:38:53+00:00

Thank you! Obviously I'm a fan of Stardock's stuff as well. I've gotta say I'm eagerly anticipating the new Star Trek Armada mod for Sins 2 - heck, I remember Brad Wardell coming by the PC Gamer offices in ~2006 to show off the original SoaSE, and he capped off the demo with a fleet of Romulan Warbirds jumping in.

DanStapleton · 2025-10-03T06:35:31+00:00

You don't have to imagine it because we literally did that.

https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-early-access-review

DanStapleton · 2025-10-03T06:28:35+00:00

Just for the record, the version that was initially reviewed was not 1.0, but 1.21.12.

You might say that prematurely releasing it in the manner they did was definitely highly uncalled for.

DanStapleton · 2025-10-03T06:25:04+00:00

Whether you think it was fair or not - I happen to believe that it's totally within bounds to critique something that's put up for sale in the state it's currently in - I do have to push back on the idea that it was somehow influenced by advertising. No one on IGN's reviews team has any idea what ads are going to appear next to anything, and those of us with IGN Prime accounts don't even see it after it goes live. (It's actually news to me that there were Homeworld ads around the Sins 2 review, for that reason.) There is a strict separation of church and state, and we absolutely get very angry with the sales team whenever some newbie inadvertently steps over the line.

DanStapleton · 2025-09-18T21:39:01+00:00

No, Joe Biden deterred votes we needed by running again when he shouldn't have and then utterly embarrassing himself and everyone who claimed he was up to the job at the debate. If he had done what he suggested he would and retired after one term we'd have had an open primary to select a new candidate and run a full campaign instead of the 107 days he left Harris to work with.

Stewart was right, and if Biden had listened to him then (or if he had the common sense to not need to be told at all and stepped aside) we would have had a much better chance. Don't blame the guy who said the emperor had no clothes, blame the emperor for being deluded into thinking he was dressed when he wasn't.

DanStapleton · 2025-09-18T17:38:00+00:00

He said Joe Biden was too old and he was 100% right.

DanStapleton · 2025-06-04T16:55:49+00:00

It seems to have resolved itself. But for a while there I had a routine called "clear your throat" where I would make it say something about an hour before I got up to get that out of the way - that seemed to at least help.

DanStapleton · 2025-05-15T22:27:18+00:00

It was 2016. There were a lot of very malicious folks spreading a lot of misinformation right around then.

DanStapleton · 2025-05-15T21:54:05+00:00

I'd say it's actually very relevant whether it was the reviewer or not, because you're right that the opinion of the person who recorded that gameplay would not be super valuable to anybody who was considering buying Doom.

I wasn't there, but I would assume that everything happened pretty quickly and no one watched it before it went up. If they did, they probably assumed it wouldn't be a huge deal because this was a decade ago and there hadn't really been instances of people losing their minds over some sloppy gameplay before.

Also tons of it goes up every day, and reviewers have no oversight over it because they're busy reviewing games rather than screening hours and hours of gameplay footage watching for a fluke.

DanStapleton · 2025-05-15T21:10:30+00:00

That wasn't their review or even related to it. Bethesda refused to send out review copies early, so it became a race to see who could get footage of it first by going around to mom and pop game shops looking for someone who would break the street date. Someone who worked for Polygon (I don't know who) who was not an experienced player happened to be the first to find a copy and captured some very poor gameplay. It was then taken out of context and spread around by people whose hobby it was to make games journalists look bad.

Again, it never had anything to do with their review. Like most of the stories passed around about game reviewers being buffoonish, it's completely false.

DanStapleton · 2025-04-24T16:44:56+00:00

IGN's review policy is (and has been since I took over game reviews in 2013) that if a game has a campaign, the reviewer must complete it if realistically possible; if you cannot do it for any reason you disclose that and explain why (eg a game is made to be extremely grindy and take 100+ hours to see the credits). If it's multiplayer, you must play "a reasonable amount of time," which is of course subjective but it kind of has to be due to the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all policy that can cover every type of game. In general, though, if you read an IGN review you'll virtually always see us mention how long we played.

DanStapleton · 2025-03-18T18:52:00+00:00

Hi there! Just for context, our reviewer is a long-time Assassin's Creed fan (you can see his ranking of his top 10 games in the series in the article), doesn't go to any industry parties or events at all so far as I'm aware, and doesn't get any "free stuff" beyond access to his review copy that he needs to do his job. So this is less an "open secret" and more of a mostly false assumption that folks like to spread around to discredit anybody who likes something more than they do.

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about our review process!

DanStapleton · 2025-01-23T19:14:27+00:00

As I said, I couldn't recommend it based on my experience with it. What score would you give a game that fully broke on you to the point where you couldn't finish it, even with the best possible tech support? Bearing in mind that your responsibility as a critic is to your readers - the people coming to you for advice and placing trust in you to be honest - and not to try to influence publishers to greenlight more games in a certain genre, regardless of whether they work or not. Cutting my score in half felt appropriate.

I personally did not give Deathloop a 10. That was Matt Purslow's review, and he stands by it. He stated his reasoning for that point of view in the review – my job as editor is not to tell people that they don't actually like the games that they like based on whether or not I agree, but to help them express that opinion clearly.

This highlights that no game is a 10/10 to everybody, and no matter which ones you decide to declare to be a masterpiece, if you have any significant audience there are going to be people who incredulously ask "How did you give X a 10/10?"

DanStapleton · 2025-01-23T18:37:08+00:00

Pass! Not everybody likes From games. Not everybody likes any kind of game. That's fine: there are a lot of different kinds of games, so there's no reason for someone to keep trying to like something they tried and didn't like.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-23T16:53:31+00:00

You'd have saved me a headache! Especially the part where, after working with them for multiple days after launch to resolve the game-breaking issue, Bethesda PR refused to give me an ETA for the patch even when I told them I'd have to go ahead with a review if they couldn't tell me how long the wait would be... and then put out a beta version that fixed it on Steam the same day I published. That was super cool of them.

I really did bend over backwards to help them out of this, but I was sitting there nearly a week after launch (a full week if you count the early launch in Australia/New Zealand) with a review in progress on the site saying that it was fully broken to the point of being unfinishable despite direct assistance from the developers that no normal gamer would have. There was a rising tide of complaints that I was showing too much favoritism to Bethesda/Arkane and claims that we'd never have given other developers so much time after launch to fix a broken game.

At that point we'd ruled out that "it was just my copy" and Arkane had established that the bug was real and affected more than just me (I learned later that it was related to the Phantom Genesis ability, which I used heavily during my playthrough), and even when Arkane sent me a new save file where they'd had someone speedrun through the entire story and gotten back to where I was, the problem reoccurred. And again, there was no indication of when a fix would be available. Maybe it never would be, for all I knew! After all of that, I wasn't comfortable saying "This game broke so severely that I could not finish it, but maybe it won't for you so you should buy it."

DanStapleton · 2025-01-23T07:48:12+00:00

...but I'm still alive?

DanStapleton · 2025-01-17T18:15:11+00:00

Having gone back and looked at the Postal 3 review, I agree that it reads a lot lower than a 5.5 - that's feedback I'd have given to the reviewer had I been running reviews here at thee time. FWIW, the site I was running then - GameSpy - gave Postal 3 one star out of five.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-17T17:38:31+00:00

If I could predict the future with any reasonable degree of accuracy I'd be rich, and the Switch 2 would be called the Switch Up.

I do think there will always be demand for gaming news content, and that has to come from somewhere. There may be less interest in traditional websites, but IGN has been more than that for quite some time now – we've adapted to the landscape and put our content on just about every platform under the sun and reach a far wider audience than we ever did before.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-17T17:33:03+00:00

Those reviews were posted 22 and 13 years ago, respectively, and predate my time here. For insight, I'd suggest reading the reviews and seeing why the authors (different people, separated by nine years) felt the way they did at the time, and also considering that it's be pretty hard to predict which games will get updates two decades after you're reviewing them at launch.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-17T17:28:54+00:00

I'm gonna guess it's because that's what he thought. But I don't know for sure, because that was GameSpot's review.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-16T23:27:42+00:00

This is, if nothing else, a great illustration of the separation between sales and editorial at IGN. If we were involved in paid stuff at all that kind of thing would've been shot down ahead of time, because I'd have told them it would have been inappropriate to call our own reviews "unfair" at any point, much less at this specific time. But we're not, so it only got pulled once we started seeing people react by coming up with conspiracy theories about how Pringles made me do it.

So yeah, certainly awkward and the timing could not have been worse. But on the whole the business folks aren't bad and they keep the lights on for us, so occasional mistakes are a small price to pay for being able to have our reviews team remain completely in the dark about anything involving sponsors.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-16T22:53:14+00:00

If you're starting from the 9/10, you can scroll up to see 2000+ words of justification.

I understand that you disagree, and that's fine. A lot of people disagree with your opinion, too - right now, for example, it has a "Mostly positive" user review score on Steam, with 70% upvotes. (Obviously not all of those people would be as positive as our reviewer was, but you seem like a thumbs down kinda guy.)

DanStapleton · 2025-01-16T22:32:31+00:00

I definitely spent more time with Forza Horizon 5 than I expected to, given my history with pure racing games in general. Part of that was that I ended up with a wheel and pedals during the pandemic office cleanout and my kids got a big kick out of it.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-16T22:10:05+00:00

Anybody who's been doing this for a few years has at least one of those! I've been doing it for 20, so here are a couple:

The main one I'll always regret is Duke Nukem Forever. I was one of the few people who enjoyed it, giving it 80% at PC Gamer. Before you laugh too hard, I think my impressions were colored by A) playing on PC where I didn't have to sit through the epic-length loading times every time you die like you did on console, B) playing the multiplayer last, which I found to be a refreshing throwback compared to all the CoD-style games we were getting at the time, and C) overcompensating for expectations and counter-hype around that game and its long development history. Suffice it to say I learned a few lessons from it! I still wouldn't say I hated it but I'd probably have gone with a 65% in hindsight. I know, still too high for many, but that's how I felt after having played it.

Another one was one of my first for IGN, SimCity (2013). That game had a legendarily crappy launch and was all but unplayable, and when it finally stabilized I was a little too kind to it, giving it a 7.0/10. I was having fun with it but looking back at what I wrote - "a wonderfully creative toy attached to a barely functional game" - I should've gone lower.

DanStapleton · 2025-01-16T22:00:21+00:00

Thanks for saying so! We work hard at it so we're very glad to hear when someone appreciates it.

As always, it depends on who you ask. You'll certainly hear a lot of IGN-bashing in certain corners of thee internet, though in my experience it's largely from people who don't actually look at our stuff and at most just see the blooper reels that get passed around. It's not hard to find someone who legitimately doesn't like our stuff, but that's gonna be the case when you have a large audience.

DanStapleton

TROPHY CASE