Roundtable: Are Live Service Games Impossible to Review?

Josh: To what extent do we as reviewers allow the idea of games as live services affect our reviews; with the knowledge that our review may become completely inaccurate not just in technical aspects but also regarding core gameplay in the future?

Andy: A review should be delivered and taken at face value. It’s too easy to promise something without ever delivering it, and I know you just thought about an example of this. What the review should seek to do is be exclusively fair to the experience afforded at the time of analysis. Anything beyond that is the reviewer acknowledging that there may be more, or that more is on the horizon. Things to consider, things to be wary of, or things to be excited about. I don’t think there’s room to review the “potential” of a game, but there is definitely room to expose it through the reviewer’s perspective.

Blake: I tend to avoid live service games, not just because I’m not interested in them, but because I don’t want to play the same game for very long. I tend to enjoy single player experiences that I can move on from. But given the absurdly popular games like Fortnite and Apex, I still think this is an important and timely question to consider. For how do you review something that’s incomplete? How do you quantify an ongoing endeavor? Do you review the game right out the gate, as happened with Anthem? Do you write a new review when the next Season Pass releases for Fortnite, or do you go back and adjust your original score? I think Andy certainly begins to answer these questions, but I’m not sure it sufficiently solves the problems outlined above. I think “potential” is an interesting metric, but I don’t know how that’s quantifiable.

Marcos: I’m a fairly big consumer regarding live service games, primarily fighting games and Destiny 2. While I do think that we should only focus on what has been delivered rather than could be, there are a great many games that flourish after a season of polish, but are stunted by impressions that left after its first week of life. I think we should be open to revisiting games that prove to work past rough launches like Street Fighter V Arcade Edition and Destiny 2 Forsaken. Much like how an unkempt game could fester, an outdated review can be detrimental to the game itself and give a potential user an incorrect impression altogether.

Ben: Similar to Marcos, I find myself constantly entrenched in at least one live service game, most recently Fortnite. Reviews for live service games are a tricky thing to really nail down, and I’m not sure anyone has quite gotten it right. I think, ideally, you have a review that updates with the game. Because that’s out of the realm of possibility, especially with games like Fortnite updating every week, the second best method is probably to do a cross-sectional review of the game and assessing the foundation it has set up for future updates. Where can the narrative expand? Is there room to add additional weapons or tools that would make returning to the game an appealing option? Creating a foundation that can be built upon is something uniquely important to live service titles.

Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.

This Epilogue Gaming Roundtable was written by Joshua Bradley, Marcos Carmona, Blake Andrea, Ben Vollmer, and Andy Webb. Edited by Blake Andrea.

itles.