“Boring games” are encouraged by Metacritic while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl suffers, Dishonored director says

November 25, 2024

Raphael Colantonio, co-founder of Arkane Studios and co-creative director of Dishonored, has poured his thoughts about Metacritic and GSC Game World’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl.

Taking to Twitter (via PCGamesN), Colantonio calls out Metacritic for encouraging developers to play it safe and calling games that get low launch scores due to bugs “misleading.” The chief reason behind it being “misleading” is that a good developer can patch the sore spots and improve the game, while “safe, boring” games will always be just that — you can’t patch what isn’t a bug.

The Metacritic ecosystem encourages devs to make safe boring games.
As long as a game is polished at launch, you’re guaranteed a 80%, no matter how boring the game might be.
Meanwhile Stalker2 gets a 73 because it’s a bit rough on the edges at launch.
Unfair, misleading..
— Raphael Colantonio (@rafcolantonio) November 23, 2024

Additionally, the larger the game is, both in scope and complexity, the harder it is to polish, with safer games being a hack for bigger studios to just churn out something guaranteed to please. A chief example of this is its A-life system, which is not working as intended at the moment, but much like the game as a whole, the team at GSC Game World is committed to fixing it up.

At the time of writing, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl sits at a 74 on Metacritic, with bugs being the prime reason the game was scored so middlingly.

Colantonio, besides working on Dishonored, also directed Prey before leaving Arkane to form WolfEye Games, which launched its debut game, Weird West, back in 2022.

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