If they had pulled out the ability to drive cars in auto Assault – yeah it impacts the review.
If a Star Wars game pulls the lightsabers because “they weren’t ready”. Nail them to the wall in the review.
Epic weapons pushed back a little in EQ2? No big deal. I mean it is disappointing, but it can’t hit the review.

Basically, it’s fair to address the expectations of gamers if the developer has been marketing off those expectations or those expectations will commonly play a role in people’s purchasing decisions. For example, if an RTS game is aiming for the same audience as Command & Conquer and Starcraft, then it’s fair to discuss features that those games have but this new game lacks.

But it’s silly when reviewers complain about a game lacking something that the game’s intended audience probably doesn’t expect; when the reviewer is just expressing his own idea of “Wouldn’t it have been cool?”. The most common example is probably “…but it doesn’t have multiplayer!”; as if all games are supposed to have multiplayer. I love coming up with game concepts, but those creative ideas have no place in a review. Subjectivity is fine, but opinion without a logical explanation is worthless to others.

Reviews are all about placing common expectations and reality side-by-side.

The thing about the epics I don’t like. I don’t want to read a review about what should have made it in. A review should be about the base product in front of you. Not what should have made it.

On the other hand if epics had been a side note and not part of the article itself I think that would have been fine.

Mentioning HOs are this late stage is kinda silly, IMO. The only thing that I can think of to merit its mention is the fact that the game was marketed as an All-In-One package rather than just the expansion itself. /shrug

I’m not that upset though. Every new expansion/large patch adds some bugs. For some they are big bugs. This time I was unlucky.

Bur judging by SOE’s track record with the last expansions I’d say RoK will be great. Once I do get it to run. My point is that a review so close to release is not that valid – except for a First Impressions thing.

But if it’s something that a designer mentioned in passing as a “feature they’d like to add in the future,” I don’t think its absence should impact a review negatively. If say, PoTBS were released without on-land melee combat as promised, or AoC without player built cities, I’d want to know that in the review. On the other hand, if a reviewer is criticizing PoTBS for not having player housing or AoC for not having flying mounts–relatively common game elements never intended to be incorporated into those particular titles–I don’t think that should come into play.

First impression reviews? No problem.

Yeah, it’s a little off that the guy is bringing up HOs which have been in game since release. I still think pulled ‘features’ should be mentioned, especially if they were hyped (note I didn’t say promised hehe). If the ads and talking heads state they want epics, reviewers should point the lack of epics out. From that quote, it sounds like he’s harping on it a bit much – it would hardly be ‘the biggest downer’ since (if they’re anything like epics in EQ1) they’ll take awhile to figure out anyway. At least SOE has come out and said they’re not in but are in testing. It wasn’t completely dropped but it wasn’t ready on release. If they didn’t say anything, then I could see people being bitter about it after they spent days scouring the content looking for the epics and their starters… but come on, they’re being up front.