I've always been very skeptical of the reviews on gog on games that have a ton of 5 stars and especially really old games where the reviewer is talking about how great the game was on release. Often times the game has not aged well and will be a major turn off to new players.

Is this just the norm when it comes to old time games? That our sense of nostalgia causes us to rate stuff higher than we should?

As an example, if you sort games by rating there's 20 pages of games. Games don't reach a 3 star rating until halfway through page 18. That means something close to 90% of the games on gog are reviewed to be 3.5 star or better! That'd be like a 70% on metacritic which I consider a pretty average rating, but on gog almost every game is average or better.

Then if you look on the high end, games don't drop to 4 stars until page 10! That means over half the games are 4.5 or better, or 90% rating! Are you serious?

I'm just struggling to see how a lot of really old titles stack up. For example ultima 1-3 is an 4 star average rating. I never played ultima originally but I got it off gog on sale to try it. And I hated it. It is simply too old and clunky to draw me away from modern rpg interpretations such as dragon age series. Maybe people will flame me but it's akin to those top 100 video game lists that put pong in the top 10 out of respect for the history of the game.

Of course the 5 star rating system might have something to do with it also. It's a pretty big jump to go from perfect rating to 80% rating, down to 60% for 3 star if you feel the ratings should convert. But I feel like an average game should be 3, good to great ones 4 and amazing, life changing ones only 5s, but so many on here seem overrated.

Thanks just my take anyway, curious if anyone agrees.

GOG reviews are useless, much worse than Steam reviews.

Yes, you're right. ignore ratings on GOG. :P

Yes but they can also underrate them. Someone who hates RPG might come in and tear Baldur's Gate to pieces which ultimately hurts the game not because of it's supposed lack of quality but because of the fact the reviewer despises the genre.

ah its complain about the ratings day again
and here i thought it would pas by with out one of them threads

They overrate games just as much as any other system. In the end it's all personal opinion and I'm not one to be swayed just because the majority may like or dislike a game.

I think the star system works better as users can show their justified degree of like/dislike better than Steam's overly vague 'one way or the other' approach.

It's inevitable on a site like this that many of the reviews are based on nostalgia. My advice is to ignore the ratings and just read the reviews. I've found that most games have at least a few really good reviews, which should give you a good idea whether you will enjoy the game.

With a few rare exceptions, there are three types of 'reviewers' on GOG from my observation:
1, Fans of the product
2. Haters of the product
3. Idiots who don't know how to read or write

In short, they are not to be taken the least bit seriously.

Most reviews are over rated any where,but the very old games as in Ultima when released
were very good but due to modern PC's today they will look bad and handle bad.That's to
be expected and some thought and info should go in a review about playing these old games
on today's PC's...
I personally have no problem playing them or buying them....

Think there might possibly be a connection between seeing it so prevalently, or it is just one big conspiracy?

You know there is something wrong when a game "receives" stars just for being indie. That term is so vague now that almost anything can qualify; whether the concept art was developed independently, the conception of design was made by an independent studio, and even sometimes just for having retro (aka: pixelated) graphics.

Shrug. Take stock in scores at your own risk.. thats always the case.
User scores for metacritic are highly polarized and unreliable too.

Oh my! Baldur's Gate currently has a 4andahalf star rating on GOG! :'(

I think a lot of the reviews on this site will be tinted by nostalgia, people will remember playing many of the games for the first time on release when they were younger and the fun times they had.

Have to admit when I was a child, any game I got (which were few and far between) was the new best thing since sliced bread and I played them all to death!

It was just an example. :P BG was the 1st RPG that came to mind.

There are a multitude of issues here.

- The highly rated reviews flood in before the game’s been made newly available for five minutes, with people keen to let us know about their nostalgia-eyed childhood experiences. These stories aren't always super helpful when making a purchasing decision but I do enjoy hearing such enthusiasm.

- Your ‘almost every game is better than average’ statistics might hold truer if GoGers reviewed poor games as much as they did great games, but they’re not paid professionals. Reviewing is done on a voluntary basis, and so they're probably more inclined to review ones that are worth the effort.

- Most of the games on GoG are actually good. GoG aren't Steam, they have to go out of their way to get someone on board and wouldn't bother in the first place if they didn't think a game had value to someone.

- How do you review something like Ultima anyway? It practically invented the CRPG as we know it. Does its place in history effect the rating?