As someone involved in the gaming industry, it is always amusing to see people arguing about 'objectivity' or 'bias' for games.

Fun fact, the vast majority gamers aren't interested in an 'informed' opinion nor an 'objective' one.

Gamers want validation that the $60 they spent on this game is the best thing since slice bread and will die before they believe otherwise.

D3 is not a bad game. Im having some fun but because im playing with friends. As soon as i beat Inferno mode ill post some feedback about it. But in all honesty, in its current state, i cant give it anything above a 7 out of 10.

Well posted my rating and it settles at 6.4. Sounds suitable for this game.

Originally posted by Creslin321

It got good reviews from critics and bad from users because users have no perspective.  Users will judge a sequel based solely on their experience with the previous, often deified, game in the series, and if they don't like what they see...they often just give it a 0.  (Good) critics on the other hand, will attempt to judge a game by its own merits as compared to the genre or even entire industry at large.

D3 has a lot of problems, and many of these seriously bother me.  Still though, I think it is a very good game.  If I were to rate it, I would give it an 8, and I think that's fair.  An 8 to me means "good enough to play for some time but nothing spectacular."

Users who give this game a 0 are being silly.  There is no way this game deserves a 0.  The lowest score I could see someone rationally giving it is a 7...anything under that is simply ridiculous.

Users also gave low rating due to many problems the game had at the start.  Those 0 represent haters and angry customers. User ratings on Metacritic are not really worth considering, I would rather read and watch user reviews, which require a bit more than adding a number and one-line comment.

I honestly think that the professional reviewers gave too high score for the game. It does not deserve a rating between 9 and 10.  I would also give it a solid 8. It is a hack-n-slash dungeon crawler that really did not bring much new to the table. I like some things more than in D2, but overall the experience is rather stale.

Reviewers want to sell, just like any company.

As a reviwer myself i can assure you that people dont read "bad" reviews, they dont even look for it, they look at the score and go to the next.

When you go buy a car how do you search for it? do you go and start looking for the ones with 3 scores? No, you go to the top and start looking, thats how it works.

Plus, its very hard to put a number on game quality, you see people here saying Diablo is a mediocre game, and thats about right, but you dont even need to go very far, you can look here at mmorpg.com and you will see really really bad games like Star Trek online got a 6.5, do you think Diablo 3 has the same score of a Star Trek Online?

Let me just say this, there is no such thing as a professional review. In most circles a professional is pretty much similar his peers, so a mechanical engineer will usually share a somewhat similar view to other mechanical engineer. Engineeers of the same level all have the same basic type of knowledge and all are united under rules from their engineer profession.

Professional reviews are under no such rule, each site has its own rules to the point where there is no consistency among reviewers even from the same site.

User reviews are a lot of the times driven by love or hate. If they love the game they gloss over issues that others might find is a big problem and if they hate it they twist issues to make it seem far worst than it really.

Speaking in terms of diablo 3, the problem is that the reviews don't necessarily value the same types of things the player do. things like ONLINE only are issues for some players, but for professional reviews not so much. Other players value graphics a lot more than the 'PRO".

TBF at the end of the day, caring what other players thing of a game be it reviewers and users is pointless. I am not saying ignore it, i am saying read as many sources as you can while trying to filter the noise by the haters and the super fan and make a decision for yourself. Or at the mimimum play the demo.