Gaming Gripes
Posted by
Nechrol
on
You know, I’m sure video game developers are becoming lazier and more arrogant, not to bite the hand that feeds or anything. At one time, game devs seemed like people you could have a drink with, share an anecdote or two. Now they seem distant, like some strange cyborg, half-man-half-robot.
If I’d have to elucidate the entity I’d imagine it as some 1000lb ambiguous white hunk of flesh, it looks like nothing in particular, like melted ice-cream. Its eyes are dollar signs and its mouth is a vacuum that sucks out your money and it lives on some ivory throne vomiting homogenized and watered down ideas onto the great unwashed below, (that’s us). We kind of stand there, with our arms and mouths open, getting showered by the effluence, the only thought keeping us going is that something worthwhile might come out of that mess.
And we’re lucky, because a few games a year are released that we truly enjoy, I honestly think that this year is starting out as a pretty good one games-wise. I still think that games are becoming lazier and stupider though, allow me to explain…
Nowadays you pretty much have a good idea of what games you want to purchase, with all the press and promotion they receive, the adverts, the Facebook campaigns, the stupid competitions, promising you free content after X many downloads of the demo. It’s like you’re walking down a street, rows of different places flank you on either side of the road. You know what you like, but by no means are you afraid to try something new.
Some eateries will just have a sign promoting it; some may have a person outside trying to catch your attention which you can easily just shrug off. What it feels like today is that I’m walking down the street and these companies are flooding every fiber of my being. If you imagine different media as different senses then it’s like a madman is holding a megaphone to your ear screaming at you to pre-order the game. Then he’ll have a flashing sign around his neck and a brass band following you while he viciously attacks you with the bat with the games logo on the thick end. It’s this bombardment of every possible media that can wear you down. The only way to stop them from breaking into your house at night and randomly hiding in closets to scare the crap out of you is to just buy the game right then and there.
I’m sure not though how effective this promotion actually is, did games like Black Ops and Dragon Age II really need that much market saturation, they were huge games anyway. Surely it cannot have increased the games total revenue that much? That may be a glib assessment but that’s how I roll.
Also, what’s the deal with ‘added content’ anyway? I recently purchased Dragon Age II, as soon as I put the disk in I’d found there already was DLC, on the DAY it was released. A person could spend £40/$60 on a game and then they have the temerity to expect you to pay for MORE content. At a time when you purchased a game you got 100% of it, now you pay full price for 75% of a game! Make the game cheaper if you expect us all to buy it on release date. It drives me mental.
I recently worked on testing Shogun 2, great game and all that but at one time all the content in the game was there. All the battles, clans, they were all one. Then they break the game up into THREE different packages with incremental content, so to get the full experience I have to pay nearly twice as much. When did we just bend over and take this?
It’s not like they’re the only ones to do it, it’s just how the market is. Nearly every big release now comes with roughly about a hundred different versions that you can purchase. Legendary, Extra, Ultimate, Prestige, go on consumer, pay 50% more because we put a cool sounding adjective in front of the title.
I’m guilty of it though, I purchased the limited edition version of DA:II, with pre-order it was basically the same price on release, which I was cool with because at least I was getting the full game. It was one of the rare instances that I would actually bow down to EA and allow them to shaft me. Only because in some weird rational they had convinced me that I was actually saving money by getting a discount on what should have been the normal price of the game with the full content.
I mean, it’s like buying a house but then saying; ‘well you’ve paid for it but you’ll have pay extra for the roof, you know to keep the serial killers and the rain out.’
Another main offender is patching a game on release and releasing games that have a million bugs. This used to mainly be a PC issue a few years back, when we had games on the PS2, Xbox and further back without internet access, updates were out of the question and so were patches. What you released was pretty much the final product and near flawless.
The attitude today is that when you set a release date you have to keep to it no matter what, who cares if content isn’t done or doesn’t work properly, we can fix that in a few months right, no rush. The first thing I have to do with a game I purchase now is after I’ve first updated my console to the latest software, waited half an hour installing it to my hardrive is then install a patch. There’s another half an hour gone. When I buy a game now it’s not truly mine (not that it ever was in the first place according to companies) I have to wait until THEY allow me to play it, being made to wait longer so they could release something incomplete just to meet a shipping order.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that games are getting more advanced and innovative and all the great stuff in between. It’s just that the process is getting more and more distant; there isn’t so much as a plug-in-and-play mentality anymore like there used to be.
Now it’s more like; buy the game, (decide which version first!), take it home, stick in it the drive, wait for an update, wait for it to install, wait for the patch, now you may start, oh wait, fill in your details so we connect you to our store. Then the console promptly flies out of the window. Playing a game seems too much like, well, work these days, where’s the joy to be had there?
Can you imagine if a company created a game in which you played as man on a journey to actually play his game? Perhaps there would be some kind of Heavy Rain inspired QTE’s where he could either make a coffee or cut off his hand while the patch installs. Now that would be one of the most emotionally engaging experiences that I would ever have in my sweet life, though I’d probably commit seppuku with the controller while it was installing.