Early reviews can make or break a game. Players who’ve preordered copies of a highly anticipated title may choose to cancel their purchases and ask for a refund after reading or watching a negative review from writers or personalities they trust.
Typically, early copies are provided to the press so they can inform their readers and the gaming public about whether a game is worth picking up. It’s no different from how film critics and entertainment journalists get to watch screeners days or even weeks ahead of the release of any major theatrical film or TV show.
With some games, review embargoes are timed simultaneously with a game’s official release, as to prevent any negative backlash from affecting early sales, which is often the case when a game publisher isn’t confident about the release. That isn’t to say that there aren’t more technical reasons for why a review might come late—distribution could be delayed, servers could be offline, and code may be incomplete.
In its announcement earlier this week about server launch times, The Division publisher Ubisoft stated that there will not be any early reviews for the game. The publisher’s reasoning for this is that the studio is unable to replicate a real-world testing environment for reviewers to experience the game in, and added that any day-one reviews of the game would likely be impressions based on the recent beta tests.
They wrote:
Since it’s impossible for us to populate the servers in a way that would adequately replicate playing The Division on launch day, reviewers will start playing the game along with everyone else when it’s released on March 8 – after the servers go live officially at 00:01AM Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT). We anticipate there may be some impressions posted online within the first few days of launch that were based on experiences with The Division Beta, and we look forward to seeing streams, videos, and opinions that provide accounts of final, in-game conditions.
As it’s unorthodox for Ubisoft to not provide reviewers and streamers to sample the full version of the game, their decision has lead gamers to speculate that the game may not be up to par with all the hype. It’s possible to compare the situation to Ubisoft’s 2014 release of Assassin’s Creed Unity, which only had its embargo lifted half a day after the game’s retail and online release. The game, while decent on its own, wasn’t up to par with other titles in the Assassin’s Creed series, which was redeemed by last year’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate in the eyes of its huge fanbase.
Gamers don’t forget, and they rarely forgive—and the Unity embargo certainly gave the public negative lasting impressions of the company.
Arguably, the alternative of inviting reviewers and streamers over to luxury suites in a hotel to play The Division in perfect conditions is a lot worse than having them experience it in a real-world environment, as such reviews rarely account for lag and other technical issues that arise on live servers. I would allude to the early reviews of SimCity in 2013, when certain reviewers gave the city simulation title perfect or near-perfect scores based on their experiences, without having to deal with the hurdles of network errors and lag that stemmed from the game’s always-online requirement. When that happened, the public lost some of its trust in certain quarters of the games press.
The Division isn’t like Assassin’s Creed Unity, and it’s certainly not like any single-player game out there. It’s essentially a massively multiplayer game that’s tied to its online experience. There is no offline mode. Like another similar title, Destiny, you can’t play the game without also having an internet connection.
Ubisoft could have invited reviewers to check the game out early, playing in those same pristine and lag-free conditions that enabled those jarring reviews of SimCity. Even if the testing sessions were done online, through scheduled dates and organized parties, the experience would simply be too controlled for it to reflect actual online play. No one’s going to rage quit in the middle of a review session among professionals.
It’s for this reason that I’d argue Ubisoft made the right call in not holding special gameplay sessions for The Division for the press, as any early review of the game would have to be taken with a grain of salt. None of these reviews would properly, or accurate reflect the game millions of gamers are going to experience.
In the case of online games like The Division, just waiting to see if the game’s worth picking up a few days after release is the best thing any discerning gamer could do for themselves. It will mean giving up pre-order bonuses, but it’s better to miss out on a few easily replaceable in-game items than spending a full $60 and regretting it.
