Exploring Players’ Perspectives: A Comprehensive Topic Modeling Case Study on Elden Ring

Abstract

Game reviews heavily influence public perception. User feedback is crucial for developers, offering valuable insights to enhance game quality. In this research, Metacritic game reviews for Elden Ring were analyzed for topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and a hybrid model combining both to identify effective methods for extracting underlying themes in player feedback. We analyzed and interpreted these models’ outputs to learn the game reviews. We aimed to identify the differences, similarities, and variations between the three to determine which provided more valuable and instructive information. Our findings indicate that each method successfully identified keywords with some similarities in identified words. The LDA model had the highest silhouette score, indicating the most distinct clustering. The LDA-BERT model had a 1% higher coherence score than LDA, indicating more meaningful topics.