Tag: battlefield 3

#oneaday Day 643: Out, Hyperbolical Fiend!

I think I’m allergic to hyperbole.

Well, okay, maybe “allergic” isn’t quite the right word. I don’t break out in a rash or anything any time someone says that something popular is good. But I do tend to find that excessive hype actually dulls my enthusiasm for something rather than fuels the fires as it may once have done in the dim and distant past.

Take the recent release of Batman Arkham City. By all accounts, it’s a marvellous game (apparently) but I have very little desire to rush out, buy it and play it. There are a number of reasons for this — cashflow, the fact my Pile of Shame grows seemingly by the day at times, and the fact I’m still playing Xenoblade Chronicles — but seeing the relentless fawning all over it recently has been a little offputting. I find it doubly offputting due to the anti-consumer practices which have been foisted upon it — for the unfamiliar, a chunk of game content is locked off behind a single-use code, meaning that only people who purchase the game brand new will be able to access it without paying extra.

From what I’ve heard, this butchered content actually isn’t particularly good, anyway, so at least that’s something — but it still smarts to know that companies are wilfully screwing over consumers in the hope to make an extra buck. There is literally no good reason for this to be implemented in the case of Arkham City, which is a single player game. Online passes which lock off multiplayer modes can use the “it’s helping to pay for the servers” argument, which is slightly more plausible, though which can still be easily debunked.

But we’re not talking specifically about Online Passes here. We’re talking about hyperbole in general.

The “big games” of the year are all coming out within the next few weeks, and it’s surprising how little I care. I attribute this to several factors: firstly, most of them are first-person shooters that involve Soldiers With Guns, and secondly, having seen the PR circus teasing pointless information about them for the last [x] months, I’m sick of the sight of them already and they’re not even out yet.

I perhaps wouldn’t be quite so sick of the sight of them were it not for the fact that the publishers of these heavily-hyped titles treat them as “products” or “consumables” rather than what they actually are, which is interactive creative works.

Let me give you some sample quotes from press releases to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here.

This delay is a move to ensure players and fans of our promise and vision to produce high-caliber games that deliver the best quality game experience.

— Sony, on the Payday: The Heist delay.

We are thrilled to see Ezio enter the world of Soulcalibur, as we believe the values of both brands fit together. We think that this partnership will bring a great new gameplay experience to both Soulcalibur and Assassin’s Creed fans.

— Ubisoft, on Ezio being the guest character in Soulcalibur V.

Letting fans vote for the UFC Undisputed 3 cover athlete is a unique way for us to connect with our extensive worldwide audience of UFC fans, fighting game enthusiasts and more casual sports followers. We look forward to seeing if Jon Jones, Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre or Cain Velasquez has what it takes to grace the cover of what will be the most invigorating MMA videogame release to date.

— THQ, on the pointless social media marketing ploy that is getting people to vote for what sweaty man will appear on the box of UFC Undisputed 3.

As you can see, these titles are being treated as products, commodities, things to be sold. All soul is sucked out of them any time you let someone with a title that includes “Vice President of [pointless-sounding department]” or “CEO” talk about it. Meaningless adjectives are applied, and talk turns to “brands” and “engaging with audiences” rather than “making a fucking badass game”.

The developers should be talking about these games. The people who are creating them, building them, testing them. Not some suit who has probably never picked up a controller by choice in his life.

Imagine how much better a press release would be if it were written by the developers and they were allowed to show some enthusiasm and/or honesty about their work, rather than sticking to a rigidly defined PR schedule.

In fact, let’s do better than that. Let’s write one.

LONDON, October 23 2011 — Studio A33 today announced their new game “Hobbit Blasters”, soon to be available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

The game revolves around the tired old concept of pointing a gun at things and pulling the trigger, but this one features arcade-style point scoring with big numbers and loud noises that make it more fun than anything you’ve ever played ever.

“Seriously, you know, it might sound a bit lame,” said Dave Thunder, lead programmer on the project, “but give it a chance. Hobbits are annoying. No-one ever seemed to comment on that fact when Lord of the Rings was big. We’re allowing you to blow the shit out of those little scrotes in HD and you wouldn’t believe how satisfying it is, particularly if the guys from the publisher have been in all morning making us sit through pointless meetings about stock value and other things we really couldn’t give a flying fuck about. There’s blood and guts and it really, positively, absolutely is fun, I promise. And if it isn’t, you can have £10 of my own money. And a pint. And a cake.”

Hobbit Blasters is in early stages of development but Studio A33 is more than happy to show off its work, warts and all, to any who are interested in seeing it.

“It’s a bit shit at the minute,” said Sally Harpy, lead graphic designer on the project. “But that’s to be expected. We’ve not long been working on it. What do you want, stunning graphics from day one? Give me a fucking break here. I’ve been slaving over concept artwork for months, and now I have to implement all that shite into the game. But if you want to come and have a look, be my guest.”

Hobbit Blasters is due out when it’s finished.

#oneaday Day 641: In Which I Berate the Games Industry for Being Fickle

Oh dear, everyone. Do make your mind up. About everything. And stick to what you believe.

Just a few months ago, roughly halfway between Black Ops coming out and the Battlefield 3/Modern Warfare 3 combo being announced, everyone had decided for the umpteenth time that they were, in fact, sick of games involving Soldiers With Guns. Originality was dying, we regularly heard, and commercialism was diluting the creativity of gaming down into a series of lowest-common denominator products designed purely to cater to the largest possible audience — seemingly, the beer-chugging dudebro. (Yes, I know some ladies play Call of Duty, too. But like it or not, gaming is still an overwhelmingly male-dominated pastime.)

Fast forward until now and suddenly everyone is happily spaffing in the faces of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 with looks of rapturous ecstasy on their faces. I’m sure they will both turn out to be competent games with pleasingly spectacular visuals, but nothing has changed — they’re still games set in war-torn cities featuring Soldiers With Guns. I still have precisely zero interest in them, so what has caused people to suddenly decide that actually, no, we don’t have quite enough games featuring Soldiers With Guns in them?

I’m not objecting to the fact that these games exist on anything other than a personal level — I’m quite aware that there are plenty of people out there who play, enjoy and even love them. The thing that is bugging me is the fickleness on display by the industry and the public. Popular opinion seems to ping-pong from one extreme to another — “I hate this!” to “This is the best thing ever!” overnight. And, seemingly, it’s taboo to speak out and say “Hang on a minute…” — largely because in these days of publisher dominance over review scores, we all know what the consequences of rating something slightly below what everyone else rates it is. You get a Cliffy B (or equivalent) ranting and raving and crying that his product has been treated unfairly.

I have played a bit of Modern Warfare 3. It was fun-ish. It didn’t make me want to rush out and buy it. I was playing the co-op Survival mode. We played, we shot men and dogs, we survived. It was nothing I hadn’t done before in many other shooters, and in many cases in much more fun situations. Killing Floor, for example, is very similar to Modern Warfare 3‘s Survival mode but is much more fun owing to its variety of enemies and settings that go beyond war-torn towns.

I have not, on the other hand, played Battlefield 3. My totally uninformed position gives me a sneaking suspicion that things might take on a similar turn there. While the FrostBite 2 engine is undoubtedly pretty and gorgeous and capable of lovely feats of graphical marvellousness, as we regularly heard in the early days of the CD-ROM revolution, graphics do not make a good game. Battlefield 3 is, as far as I can make out, also not doing anything hugely revolutionary that hasn’t been done elsewhere before. Military shooters are a dime-a-dozen, and military shooters with vehicles have been done before, too — and on larger-scale maps by titles such as ArmA.

I don’t dislike the genre per se — to sound like a Daily Mail reader desperately trying to prove he’s not a racist for a moment, some of my favourite experiences with past games have been in the shooter genre. Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, No-One Lives Forever, SiN, TimeSplitters — all are examples of an overcrowded genre, but all, too, are examples of games which go a step beyond just being a cookie-cutter game involving Soldiers With Guns.

And yet two almost identical-looking games featuring Soldiers With Guns are tipped to be the biggest-selling titles of the year, while other games fall by the wayside. Where’s the justice?

Live and let live, I guess. So long as there are people online for me to play Dungeon Defenders with — and there seem to be plenty at the moment, thankfully — I’ll happily leave the Soldiers With Guns fans to their business and get on with mine. But I still wish that for once, when everyone finally tires of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 and the inevitable sequels to both get announced halfway through next year, people will actually stick to their guns (no pun intended) for once and say “No! Look, we’ve had enough. Do something different, for fuck’s sake.”

I don’t see it happening, however. Still, as I say, so long as the more creative underbelly of the industry continues to thrive as it does, I’ll happily go on supporting the games that no-one else is playing. It’s a much more exclusive club, and one that’s a pleasure to be a part of.