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Breath of The Wild has enraptured fans and critics alike in the week since its launch. Touted as one of the greatest open world games in a decade, the most awesome Zelda since Ocarina of Time, and the most excellent video game to come out in recent memory.

Flawless and perfection are the adjectives that echo in everyone's words that talk about this newest iteration of Zelda. But not everyone has been echoing the same sentiment, and one man, in particular, is paying pretty dearly for his opinion.

Jim Sterling, known for his no-nonsense and polarizing views on the gaming industry, has taken fire for seemingly being responsible for Breath of The Wilds drop from 98 to 97 on Metacritic after publishing his review giving the game a 7/10. (Boy that sure looks familiar.)

“At its absolute best, Breath of the Wild offers some of the most absorbing experiences a Zelda game ever has.

“Unfortunately, it makes you work harder for it than you should, buried as it is under a pile of small but constant irritations that collaborate to form a thick crust of frustration around a delectable center.

“Breath of the Wild is a delightful adventure, one that tries its utmost to be as big a pain in the arse as possible.”

In the hours since publishing his review, Sterlings website has gone down and is currently inaccessible at the time of this writing. He has also received numerous public death threats and even has shared straw polls demanding he be hanged for his opinion.

Truly, I wish I could say I understood what all the critics were raving about in their onslaught of 10/10 reviews, but I don’t. I see too many things getting in the way of the brilliance, too much repetitive busywork and full-on dick moves for me to say this is even close to my favorite Zelda game, much less in the top five.

Close, but no Triforce.

Silencing criticism with DDoS's and hate speech is an unfortunate and unnecessary consequence of modern internet media. No one should be silenced for their opinion as everyone has a right to their views.

What does our community make of this recent news? How do you all feel about what happened to Sterling?

 

[Benja81]

Not surprised that people would stoop so low as to DDoS Jim Sterling and try to hijack his social media, the ultra Nintendo hardcore "fans" are literal cult members. Close minded, stupid, anti gaming, anti anything that slights Nintendo in the mildest of ways. I know them all to well, I have had to deal with that sort of crowd here on many occasions. I remember one time I posted a news article just before the Wii U was released that a lot of devs thought the Wii U was significantly underpowered. The backlash against me was both hilarious and disgusting, it was ironic that the news piece was firmly grounded in truth.

Nintendo fanboys are the worst and the Zelda zealots are the cream of that shit heap. Dealing with those sort of people for so many years has played a significant part in me losing my love for and being apathetic towards Nintendo.

I genuinely hate these sort of people. Go die in a fire if a review score offends your delicate sensibilities.

Come on now, this has nothing to do with Nintendo fans. Its a human trait. People get like this with anything they are passionate about, especially when they are trying to remain blindly loyal. Point is, this happens with all kinds of things in life, not just Nintendo fans.

 

[The Catboy]

I don't watch his videos, no. As I mentioned earlier in the thread I don't like his personality or the schtick he does. As far as I can tell, he's set himself up as a troll/joke reviewer from the beginning, so he probably shouldn't be all that surprised when people don't take him seriously or he gets trolled right back.

7/10 is fair depending on subjective opinion, the bigger issue here is that it's impossible to know if he was being honest by labeling the game with that number or if he had other motivations for it (back to the troll/joke thing).

If you actually knew anything about him, this wouldn't be a question.
He's known to really mix both, but still keep with his honest thoughts on an issue. If he was intending to ruffle feathers, he would have given the review a much lower score. Instead he simply gave the game a decent rating.

 

[smilodon]

Fanboys are dumb, clickbait is dumb, metacritic is dumb and water is wet.

There, 7 pages in one sentence.

 

[ThisIsMyDogKyle]

Someone gives it a 7/10 that's fine, it's their opinion, I can even see how the game isn't for everyone and someone might give it that. however, when that same person gave Fallout 4 a 9.5, Skyrim a 10, Watch Dogs 2 a 9, has repeatedly let people know how much he hates Nintendo even recently telling people to pirate their games, and even got some stuff objectively wrong in the review ("you have to remember the shrine locations or you won't find them again" is laughably dumb when the game gives a you a large number of options to keep track of shrines), I'm kinda gonna doubt just how valid of a reviewer you are. I really don't get the people getting upset though, like, just ignore him and move on?

 

[conradcervantes]

The guy loves making videos about how much of a target he is for publishers and overzealous fans alike, so this should keep his Patreon well-stuffed for the time being.

 

[Naridar]

Sterling's review is trolling and attention-wh*ring, a sick desire to steal the spotlight, nonchalantly and maliciously spitting on a developer team's long years of work just for his umpteenth 15 minutes of fame. Nintendo deserves honest opinion for their effort and this vulture of a journalist only has himself to blame for every DDoS and threatening letter coming his way. I'm honestly surprised (and slightly appalled) nobody has tried to bash his mug in in real life so far.

Additionally, review aggregate sites would be more accurate by disregarding the top and bottom 10% of scores, neutralizing and discouraging trolls like him.

 

[Foxi4]

It should be a decent score, but people (both readers and reviewers) are equating the scale with the percentage scale used for (American) school grades, where 70% is a low C or a high D, which is not a good grade. So 7/10 has come to mean "barely worth playing" and is seldom used, and the entire scale of 1 to 10 has become crammed in between the 8 and the 10, and we have scores with decimal places which is fucking ridiculous. Not to mention that any review worth reading can't be boiled down to a single number but hey, reading is hard.

I firmly believe that the very idea of a numerical score is stupid, decimal points or not - you can't boil an experience down to a number. A simple "yay" and "nay", play it or avoid it kind of a conclusion would be entirely sufficient, the rest is covered by the text and boiled down in the pros and cons. You don't need the number at all, it exists solely to power aggregation sites like Metacritic.

 

[Xzi]

Someone gives it a 7/10 that's fine, it's their opinion, I can even see how the game isn't for everyone and someone might give it that. however, when that same person gave Fallout 4 a 9.5, Skyrim a 10, Watch Dogs 2 a 9, has repeatedly let people know how much he hates Nintendo even recently telling people to pirate their games, and even got some stuff objectively wrong in the review ("you have to remember the shrine locations or you won't find them again" is laughably dumb when the game gives a you a large number of options to keep track of shrines), I'm kinda gonna doubt just how valid of a reviewer you are. I really don't get the people getting upset though, like, just ignore him and move on?

See that's what really irks me. If BotW is a 7, modless (vanilla) FO4 and Skyrim are a 5.5 or a 6 at best. If you freely hand out 10s to bug-ridden games with next to no difficulty, then BotW clearly deserves a 10, being mostly bug-free and a decent challenge. A reviewer with no baseline and no personal standard scale for scoring is useless. If the reviewer doesn't know what a 1 or a 10 means to them, how is the reader supposed to know?

 

[Foxi4]

Certainly their competence is at least on the level of MS and Sony. The problem is judging Nintendo products on a completely separate and more heavily-weighted scale. Pirating most Xbox and Playstation games is just as easy, so Sterling encouraging the piracy of Nintendo games only is stupid.

The quality of Nintendo products fell off a cliff since the GBA/GC, and it's been on a steady decline. Don't get me wrong, as you know, I had high hopes for the Switch, but the bitter reality is slowly outweighing the optimism. I honestly believe that the system should've been released in Autumn with all the kinks worked out and a proper launch library, not five physical games, only one of which being a noteworthy AAA title.

 

[Xzi]

The quality of Nintendo products fell off a cliff since the GBA/GC, and it's been on a steady decline. Don't get me wrong, as you know, I had high hopes for the Switch, but the bitter reality is slowly outweighing the optimism. I honestly believe that the system should've been released in Autumn with all the kinks worked out and a proper launch library, not five physical games, only one of which being a noteworthy AAA title.

There's no guarantee the system would have any fewer kinks just by releasing later, not that it has any fatal flaws anyway. No guarantee they could have had a lot more games prepared for it, either. We've been over this already though, the 3DS release schedule worked out far better for Nintendo in the long run, and so of course they're going to repeat lessons learned from that rather than following the Wii U route.

 

[Benja81]

The quality of Nintendo products fell off a cliff since the GBA/GC, and it's been on a steady decline. Don't get me wrong, as you know, I had high hopes for the Switch, but the bitter reality is slowly outweighing the optimism. I honestly believe that the system should've been released in Autumn with all the kinks worked out and a proper launch library, not five physical games, only one of which being a noteworthy AAA title.

I always feel like people's idea of quality with Nintendo is purely based on specs.

 

[Veho]

You don't need the number at all, it exists solely to power aggregation sites like Metacritic.

Rotten Tomatoes has a percentage rating calculated solely off of "yay" and "nay" scores. There's no stopping aggregate sites.

 

[YugamiSekai]

I'm with the attackers on this one.

 

[DeslotlCL]

I'm with the attackers on this one.

so rude

so pathetic

 

[YugamiSekai]

so rude

so pathetic

my life in two sentences

 

[donaldgx]

first time i read about this "pro reviewer" guy,
Wonder how many thousands will not buy BoTW now that this "pro reviewer" gave it a low score

 

[DeslotlCL]

first time i read about this "pro reviewer" guy,
Wonder how many thousands will not buy BoTW now that this "pro reviewer" gave it a low score

I pirated it.


Fite me.

 

[Kioku]

so rude

so pathetic

14 year olds in a nutshell

 

[DarkCoffe64]

Seems like humanity has forgot that you can ignore things.



Yeah, you can do that instead of getting "triggered", like young'uns say today. Amazing, isn't?

 

[Armadillo]

I can't ignore things .

I already bought the game, unfortunately it has to go in the bin now. A 97 shall not be part of my collection