Vainamoinen: I didn't mean to make a general comment on the gaming press in any way. Today, low budget indie games manage to get the same marks AAA developers get for their billion dollar ventures, and a special focus lies on games that aren't by any stretch of the imagination "mainstream"; and that's real, visible progress in game press practice.
The Technomancer developers AIMED for Mass Effect, which by EA's definition is a constant barrage of incredibly expensive assets. Whether Technomancer's faults are design inherent, that's a valid question for the press to ask.
Ah OK, I had no idea they actually
aimed for Mass Effect ... that's a big statement by
any studio.
However I still maintain that journalists and critics must be rather dumb to expect the production quality from a smaller studio like Spiders to match that of BioWare and their wealthy publisher.
Regardless of their aim.
Somewhere along the line a games journalist or critic should have developed a sense of reason, to have rational expectations. Expecting a game from a smaller studio to match that of a wealthy big one in terms of production quality is not rational.
Most games journalist and critics are well aware of the differences in funding between an Indie studio and a triple-A studio, and so they don't have the same expectations.Yet they don't extend the same rationale and logic to "medium" studios. They expect medium studios to be able to match wealthy bigger ones.
The most popular Indie games
are mainstream games, as an Indie game can still be mainstream.
Look at Minecraft, Terraria, Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Stardew Valley, Prison Architect, Undertale and so on.
It's not a game's
genre that makes something mainstream, as exemplified by the mainstream success of games like American Truck Simulator and Factorio. What makes something mainstream is the spread and popularity of the game among the masses,
regardless of game niche, and the cult status that the game consequently gains from this popularity.
The sole job of gaming media is to sniff out potential mainstream games and find new games to hate on, because they need game consumers to be angry, melodramatic and obsessive.