[03/23/2004]   Today's update is too important to the continuation of the section as a whole for me to print any reviews. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and promise an update of suitable penance next week. However, so that we have time to adequately cover all the necessary points of interest, let me just tell you to go redownload the review template of your choice, read the FAQ, and go over the review ratings index before you read any further.

Alright. Now that you have a small inkling of what's going on, let me stress the bigger points right here. First off, RPGamer's long maintained 1 - 10 rating system is no more. As of today, all previously written reviews, and all future reviews will use a 1 - 5 scale for not only the overall scores, but for every subsection of the review breakdown. This means that virtually every review currently in the archives will be undergoing editing on a massive scale. To give you a description of what the conversion will involve, keep these following things in mind.

Every score of 1 will stay as it currently is. Every score of 10 will similarly become a 5. However, it is the middle sections that are going to have the most work done on them. Although we have tried for time out of mind to impress upon people that '5' was average on the 1 - 10 scale, the curse of school and 7 = C has reared its head regardless. Keeping that in mind, 2s and 3s will become 2s; 8s and 9s will become 4s; and 4s, 5s, 6s, and 7s will all become 3s. Please do not email us about changing this system as it will not alter our view on this point. If you have a legitimate concern that converting one of your reviews in such a manner will undermine your view of the game, then please contact us on a case by case basis. Alternately, simply rewrite the review using the new system, and give it whatever score you desire. This conversion is as much for balancing the system as it is for inspiring writers to rethink their views on games they might not have played for a long time.

As to the other major changes to the review template, the deletion of replay value has been a long time in coming. Thanks in large part to the relative non-issue it presents in most RPGs, we felt that other things could better fill its place. As for where interface and localization went... Well, they were combined with fun factor and turned into one cohesive element that we entitled interaction. Feel free to think of this piece of the breakdown as playability, or how you - as a player - interact with and/or control the flow of the game.

If you have any questions as to what the future holds, please either email us with your concerns, or post on the message boards at the link below. We will try to respond to you as quickly as possible, but bear in mind that during a change of this magnitude, we may end up extremely swamped in the 'need to reply to this person' department. Thanks again for your continued reader and writership of Points of View, and I hope to see great things starting next week as we progress toward the future.