Never, not once, I went to see a flick “because Ebert said it was good, so it must be”, but his reviews have served me many times to pay attention to things I might have otherwise missed.

That’s what reviews (of anything) are for: Not a summing up of facts, not the final authority on anything, but simply the opinion of someone whom, hopefully, knows what he’s talking about and you can use to finish fleshing out your own view.

I want to say, but who actually listens to Roger Ebert? Which makes me realize I shouldn’t care about this anymore. Especially since I can’t even play DF anymore (damn yous will power!).

However, isn’t this already solved? There’s already plenty of information and opinions about Darkfall out there.

1- He will assume -a lot- of stuff and leave it out of the review. Unless he’s writing for “Open PvP No Holds Barred Ganksta Land” (or whatever), the readers will come from a broader section and will have no idea what he’s talking about at times.

2- You risk ending up with a review that’s unnecessarily gushing (because the fan might think he found the second coming of the flavor) or unnecessarily harsh (because the fan can’t get over ‘all the little things’ they’ve done to his precious flavor). Both are bad because both leave things out.

We don’t leave in an ideal world, but ideally you really don’t want to send a fan to review anything. You don’t send the guy that had the stormtrooper wedding to review Star Wars, you send Roger Ebert.

I would say that in order for a full review you would have to join a guild/alliance and participate in some large scale battles. If you don’t do that then it’s like reviewing WoW and saying the raiding sucks because Ragefire Chasm/Deadmines sucked.

However, IMO, the game doesn’t need to be reviewed by someone that has no interest in it. The people looking for and finding the review obviously have some interest in the game. The game is aimed at a target audience, by just looking at the rules (open pvp, full loot, first person, etc) it is obvious there is a large percentage of MMO players who will be completely turned off by it. The best way I can put it, even though it is lame and stupid and I’m sorry that I’m even saying this, but if you send a sheep into the wolves den he probably isn’t going to like it. Just like if you let someone who loves DF review WoW or LotRO or any other big MMO they’re going to write a review that the majority of players will disagree with.