The shadowkeep review — why this?

To begin with, I struggled to come up with a genre focus or text-based media to write for this task. I eventually decided to focus on writing a review on the newest expansion of a game I enjoy. With this I thought at least I’d be writing about something I like and that might make it easier for me to actually do it.

to start I had a familiarity with videogame reviews from my many years of consuming game journalism so I had a rough idea of the general format and I now believe it follows the martini glass structure with typical game reviews leading with a big starting point about the game then following onto its key facts, chronology of story events and the kicker being its conclusion and potential scores/recommendations.

The main focus of my research was the site Kotaku which has reviews from a variety of its team but as such, had allot of conflicting review styles with some sticking to more traditional structures like I ended up writing and others being more of an experience based piece detailing their time in the game. This ended up leading me to be conflicted in my approach, but I ultimately decided on the more traditional style.

Writing it was fairly straightforward as I tried to follow the martini structure with the leading piece of it being 5 years since the destiny franchise launched and how only now do we get our first proper look at the entity we have been spending all these years fighting in game. Then the key facts about the free to play model launching and bungie being independent now followed by a brief chronology of some story events and what the new season adds. This is finished with my closing thoughts, but I decided against giving a numbered score as more and more publications ditch this convention and instead opt for a more recommendation-based conclusion. Kotaku’s reviews for example give points the reviewer did and did not like and a sentence on if they would recommend it.

As my review is a brief summary, the only real ways I see it could have been done differently is by changing it to a more experience based review detailing my experiences in full or by writing a more personal piece but in the current internet climate, people either want to watch a video for a few mins with the written piece as a script or just have a short piece to read as it will not take up much time or lose their attention.