Let’s talk about trust. Specifically, about the question of whether the relationship between mainstream games media and the people who actually play games has broken down to the point where the reviews are now actively misleading rather than merely occasionally wrong.
Two games. Two review scores. Two wildly different outcomes.
And sitting in the middle of it all, looking increasingly uncertain about the whole enterprise, is IGN — the world’s most visited gaming website, which in the space of a few months managed to be significantly more enthusiastic about a game that shut down in forty-five days than about one that sold three million copies and is sitting on a Mostly Positive rating on Steam from hundreds of thousands of actual players.
A remarkable achievement. Not a good one, but remarkable nonetheless.
Let’s examine the evidence.
Exhibit A: Crimson Desert
Crimson Desert launched in March 2026 to the kind of anticipation that only six years of development and some genuinely extraordinary pre-release footage can generate. Pearl Abyss had spent half a decade transforming what began as an MMO prequel into a standalone single-player action RPG of enormous ambition. The early clips had the internet comparing it to Red Dead Redemption 2. The pre-orders surged past 400,000 on visuals alone.
IGN’s review-in-progress, after 110 hours with the game, settled on 6 out of 10. The verdict: an extremely ambitious open-world adventure, undermined by bad writing, infuriating puzzles, and a combat system that frustrated as often as it delighted. Fair enough observations, several of which other critics made too.
The reviewer also apparently hit a major quest bug that lost him hours of progress, which is the kind of thing that will test anyone’s patience and which Pearl Abyss subsequently patched — though the review score, naturally, was not subsequently patched. Metacritic landed at 78 — not a disaster, but below what the pre-release hype had promised.
Being able to befriend cats was always going to win over players (images credit: Pearl Abyss)
Then something interesting happened. Players got their hands on it.
Steam’s review score, which opened in mixed territory around 51%, began climbing. Pearl Abyss — to their considerable credit — responded to feedback with unusual speed, dropping a patch addressing over 100 issues within the first week. The score climbed to 66%, then 77%, then beyond. At the weekend peak, SteamDB recorded over 6,000 positive reviews in a single day against approximately 150 negative ones — a 98% approval rate. The concurrent player count held steady around 200,000 daily, peaking near 250,000. The game sold over three million copies.
The community verdict, in short, was emphatic. This was a game that rewarded patience and exploration in ways that a review-window playthrough — however thorough — couldn’t fully capture. The vast open world, the layered systems, the sense of discovery that deepened with time: these are qualities that don’t yield their best in the first 110 hours, let alone the first twenty. One community member on Metacritic put it more bluntly: “This review will age like sour grapes.” As of now, that prediction looks reasonable.
Exhibit B: Highguard
Highguard launched on January 26, 2026, to the kind of anticipation that only an awkward reveal at The Game Awards — where it replaced the expected triple-A announcement in the coveted final slot — and six weeks of developer silence can generate.
The team at Wildlight Entertainment, alumni of Apex Legends and Titanfall, had built a 3v3 PvP raid shooter with mounted combat, destructible environments, and a high-fantasy-meets-guns aesthetic that immediately drew comparisons to Concord. None of those comparisons were meant kindly.
IGN’s verdict: 7 out of 10. Better than Crimson Desert, apparently — a game which, to recap, sold three million copies and has hundreds of thousands of daily active players. Several other critics were similarly measured — Game Informer called it a “promising contender,” while PC Gamer published a piece explicitly titled “Highguard Deserves a Chance,” scolding the gaming community for writing it off before giving it a fair hearing. The tone was that of a disappointed parent asking the children to be nicer to the new kid at school.
What are you smiling about? (Image credit: Wildlight Entertainment)
The gaming community’s response was to give it a very fair hearing and then leave.
Highguard peaked at over 97,000 concurrent Steam players within its first hour. Within 48 hours it had lost 90% of them. Steam reviews opened at “Overwhelmingly Negative.” The developer laid off most of their staff sixteen days after launch.
The servers were shut down on March 12, 2026 — less than fifty days after release. In their closing statement, Wildlight noted that over two million players had stepped into Highguard’s world. Two million people tried it. Two million people decided against staying.
The critics said: give it a chance. Two million people gave it a chance. They all left.
The Uncomfortable Question
The same publication scored a game that players abandoned en masse higher than a game that players are actively enthusiastic about in their hundreds of thousands. The professional verdict and the player verdict were not merely different — they were almost exactly inverted.
Something doesn’t add up (Images credits: Pearl Abyss / Wildlight Entertainment)
This is not a new phenomenon. The disconnect between critic scores and player reception has been growing for years, to the point where Metacritic’s separation of critic and user scores has become a frequently cited symptom of a wider cultural gap.
But the Crimson Desert and Highguard situation is a particularly clean example of the problem because the two cases sit right next to each other in time, involve some of the same reviewers, and tell contradictory stories.
The criticism most often levelled at Crimson Desert — that the writing is weak and certain systems are over-complicated — is accurate. These are real issues. But a game that sells three million copies and generates near-unanimous enthusiasm from players who have spent significant time with it is not a 6 out of 10 in any meaningful sense of that number.
A 6 out of 10 communicates “below average.” Crimson Desert is not below average. It is an imperfect masterpiece of open-world design that happens to have a bad story, which puts it in the company of approximately half the greatest games ever made.
The defence of critics here — and it is a legitimate defence — is that reviews are necessarily time-limited, written under embargo pressure, and reflect the game as it existed at a specific moment. Pearl Abyss’s responsiveness to feedback changed Crimson Desert meaningfully in the first week. A review written before those patches captures a different product. This is a genuine problem with the current review ecosystem rather than evidence of individual incompetence.
A game that two million people tried and immediately abandoned is not a 7 out of 10.
But that defence does not extend to Highguard. A game that two million people tried and immediately abandoned is not a 7 out of 10. It is not a game that deserves a chance that ungrateful gamers refused to give it.
It is a game that two million people gave a chance, found wanting, and walked away from in an industry where the competition for attention has never been more intense. The players were not wrong. They were not impatient. They were not review-bombing out of cultural grievance. They played the game, and then they stopped playing it, and then the servers shut down.
So What Are Game Reviews Actually For?
Here is the honest answer, which the industry rarely acknowledges: professional game reviews are largely written by people whose relationship with games is fundamentally different from the people reading them.
A professional reviewer plays games under pressure, to deadline, across genres they may not have chosen, in conditions that bear little resemblance to the circumstances under which their readers will encounter the same game. They have played everything. Their frame of reference is the entire history of the medium.
Opinions vary wildly (Image credit: Metacritic)
Their tolerance for friction is calibrated by having played through thousands of hours of friction professionally. Their enthusiasm is tempered by having seen every genre convention executed a hundred times.
By the time a professional reviewer sits down with a new open-world action RPG, they have played so many open-world action RPGs that they are essentially reviewing the genre’s relationship with itself rather than the game in front of them. This is useful information. It is not the same information most players are looking for.
Most players are not this. Most players are buying a game to spend sixty or eighty hours with something they’ve chosen based on a specific kind of enthusiasm. They are not comparing Crimson Desert to every open-world game ever made. They are comparing it to the last few games they played and asking whether this one is fun. The answer, for most of them, appears to be yes.
This does not make critics useless. It makes them useful for different things than we typically ask of them. A critic who says Crimson Desert’s writing is poor is telling you something true and worth knowing before you buy. A score that implies the game is below average is not.
Where Should Gamers Actually Look?
The honest answer is: multiple sources, weighted appropriately.
Steam reviews, filtered to “Recent” rather than “All Time,” give you the closest thing available to a real-time consensus from people who have actually paid for and played the game. They are imperfect — review bombing exists, day-one technical frustration skews early scores, cultural pile-ons happen — but the signal-to-noise ratio improves substantially if you read the actual text of reviews rather than just the percentage. A hundred reviews saying “the controls are clunky but the world is incredible” tells you more than a single number.
Metacritic’s user score is worth checking alongside the critic score, specifically to identify the gap between them. A wide gap in either direction is itself informative. Crimson Desert’s gap — critic score 78, user score climbing toward the same number after initial mixed reception — tells a story about a game that requires time to reveal its quality. A wide gap in the other direction tells a story about a game the industry is more excited about than players are.
OpenCritic is worth bookmarking as an alternative aggregator that includes a “recommended by critics” percentage alongside the score, which is sometimes more revealing than the number itself.
YouTube long-form content — not review videos, but “X hours later” retrospectives from players who have lived with a game — is increasingly the most reliable source of information about whether a game is actually worth your time. These creators have no review embargo, no deadline, and no incentive to compress their assessment into a score. They will tell you whether the game gets better or worse after twenty hours, which is information that professional reviews structurally cannot provide.
And for the specific question of whether a live-service multiplayer game is worth your time? Look at the player count graphs on SteamDB. A game that retains players is a game people are enjoying. A game that loses 90% of its player base in forty-eight hours is not a game you want to invest time in, regardless of what anyone scored it.
Could the System Actually Be Fixed?
It’s worth asking, if only because the current arrangement clearly isn’t working as well as it should, and “read Steam reviews and hope for the best” is a fairly underwhelming conclusion to a systemic problem.
The most obvious reform would be to move away from single-reviewer scores entirely. A game as large and systems-dense as Crimson Desert probably shouldn’t be assessed by one person’s 110 hours — it should be assessed by several people with different play styles, different genre preferences, and different tolerances for narrative weakness, whose collective experience produces something closer to a rounded picture. The aggregate of three or four considered opinions, with a written discussion of their disagreements, would almost certainly reflect reality better than a single number attached to a single experience under deadline pressure.
A “living review” model has also been proposed in various corners of the industry
Some outlets already gesture toward this with “staff picks” or “verdict” sections where multiple voices weigh in before a final score is assigned. It’s a start. The problem is that the entire review economy — the advertising deals, the Metacritic bonuses baked into developer contracts, the day-one traffic spike that makes reviews commercially viable — runs on the single number. The number is the product. The nuance is the packaging. Reforming the number means reforming the business model, which is a considerably larger project.
A “living review” model has also been proposed in various corners of the industry — an initial assessment published at launch, updated at thirty days, updated again at ninety. This would have served Crimson Desert considerably better: the launch review captures a buggier, less polished version of the game; the thirty-day review captures Pearl Abyss’s rapid-response patching; the ninety-day review captures the game that hundreds of thousands of players are enthusiastically logging into.
The problem, again, is commercial. The traffic that makes a review valuable arrives in the first 48 hours. A ninety-day update gets roughly the same number of clicks as a correction notice — which is to say, almost none.
None of this is impossible. All of it would require the industry to prioritise accuracy over traffic, which is asking rather a lot. But the gap between what professional reviews deliver and what players actually need is wide enough now that something, eventually, will have to give. Whether that something is the review model or the audience’s remaining trust in it is the question nobody at the major outlets seems particularly keen to answer.
The Verdict
Professional game reviews are not useless. They are written by knowledgeable people who play games carefully and articulate their observations with more sophistication than most player reviews manage. They are worth reading.
They are not, however, the final word on whether a game is worth your time, your money, and the sixty hours of your life you might spend with it. They are one data point in a picture that requires several. A critic who plays Crimson Desert for 110 hours and scores it 6 out of 10 has told you something. A quarter of a million players logging in daily and generating a 98% positive review rate have told you something considerably more.
The gaming community’s relationship with professional criticism is currently somewhere between mistrust and contempt, and a significant portion of that sentiment is earned. Not because critics are corrupt or incompetent, but because a scoring system that puts Highguard above Crimson Desert has something structurally wrong with it — and the players, who are ultimately the ones whose experience of these games actually matters, can see that clearly even if the institutions cannot. IGN’s Metacritic page will not be updating its scores. The servers for Highguard, however, are also not updating anything, on account of being switched off.
Read the critics. Read the player reviews. Check the concurrent player counts. And then make up your own mind — which is, after all, what you were going to do anyway.
Crimson Desert is available now on Steam. Highguard shut down on March 12, 2026. Check out our Crimson Desert launch feature.