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The story
Gears of War: E-Day, the new Xbox Series X/S and PC title, has launched with a Metacritic score of 89 — a high mark for a Microsoft first-party release that sparked surprise in the thread. At the same time, GameSpot’s score of 7 and French outlet Gamekult’s unusually low 50 became a talking point after they dragged the aggregate score down by 2 points. Scores vary wildly between outlets, with IGN’s provisional score sitting at 90 and IGN Spain awarding a perfect 100. On top of that, Digital Foundry reported on a technical workaround that uses the SSD to compensate for the Xbox Series S’s limited memory, drawing attention beyond just the scores.
What people said
Re: #2
No clue what they're seeing, but that score is crazy high.
There's usually a built-in "MS penalty" that knocks off about 10 points (a running joke that reviewers lowball Microsoft games).
Unlike some other first party putting out garbage like Wolverine.
What's with the "PS5" in the thread title?
You can't even play this on PS5.
They posted a fake source claiming stuff like OD and PHYSHINT were coming to PS5, so they must be getting pretty desperate.
Figured it was probably Gamekult, and yep — it was Gamekult.
They should really drop that site from the aggregate at this point.
Sites that aren't serious about reviewing should all be excluded.
That Gamekult outlet's other reviews are all over the place too, lol
https://www.metacritic.com/publication/gamekult/
and Gears always ends up needing censorship that's not worth the hassle.
Speaking of which, is there actually a Japanese dub this time?
Checked the Xbox Store listing — the Japanese audio box is checked.
Same voice actor, but it's been 15 years since he last played the role, so the performance has shifted quite a bit.
Well, he's 75.
Though realistically I won't actually get to play until tomorrow night.
GameSpot gave it a 7.
GameSpot's basically the poster child for anti-MS outlets — they've been cranking out shameless Xbox smear pieces almost daily for years now.
Meanwhile IGN — the other big one — has it at a provisional 90 while the review's still in progress.
And IGN Spain gave it a perfect 100.
So once again Microsoft actually pulled off something Sony just talked big about?
No joke, apparently they developed tech to use the SSD as game memory and actually got around the Series S's memory shortage.
https://www.digitalfoundry.net/features/how-gears-of-war-e-day-solves-the-series-s-memory-issue-by-tapping-the-ssd
Everyone's clustering their releases around this window to avoid colliding with GTA6.
Background and Key Points
Aggregator sites like Metacritic calculate a simple average across outlets, so a single reviewer handing out an extremely low score can drag the overall number down significantly. Gamekult, mentioned in the thread, has a history of wildly erratic scoring, and this case once again exposed that weakness in the aggregation method. The stark divide between GameSpot’s 7 and IGN’s 90 is another example of how much outlets’ priorities can differ. Note that while the original thread title includes “PS5,” the game is an Xbox Series X/S and PC exclusive and will not be released on PS5 — on hardware-focused boards it’s common practice to tack an unsupported platform’s name onto a thread title just to drive views, so the actual supported platforms can differ from what the title implies. The SSD-as-memory technology is also newsworthy in its own right, since tech outlets praised it as a concrete solution to the Xbox Series S’s well-known memory constraints.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[PS5] Gears of War: E-Day Launches with Metascore of 89.”
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