What the hell happened?
Did you outsource to thirteen year olds who are far more obsessed with pink shiny things than I am? Perhaps you’ve been trying to market to five year olds, because lately, everything that you’ve marketed to me has not been the stimulating, razor’s-edge-entertainment you’ve been promising.
Age of Conan: Ginormous fail boat
Age of Conan happily lead me on a long walk of false-awesomeness. At first, the beheading, the amazing textures, the voice overs–they helped pull the nerdling wool over my eyes. I was sold, or was I (dramatic music goes here)? I made my way through Tortage with stars in my eyes, giggling merrily whenever I had a fatality that would fill my screen with blood. Granted, the nay sayers started in on this game the moment it was open beta, which rankled me more than anything.
Alas, the dream soon turned to waking. At first, it was my disappointment in crafting. I knew that AoC didn’t want to focus on crafting, that it wasn’t as important as other game issues and I was willing to over look that. Then I reached 59 with my main, a priest of Mitra and the wool was crudely torn from my eyes. There was nothing for me to do, content wise, but grind three or four instances, with the same spawns, over and over again until–what? Until I hit mid 70’s?
No, thanks. Don’t misunderstand me. This game is gorgeous and amazingly well done. So long as you don’t go any higher in level than 50. (Or at least, it was this way at the time of me quitting.) There was literally levels and levels of content-gap where there were no quests and nothing for you to do. Sorry, but, no-can-do-thar, Funcom. Maybe we’ll talk again in a year, kay?
Spore and its lies
And Spore! Spore! You lied so hard to me! Oh, Spore, you looked like a game I could have sunk my teeth into. You were something different with countless thousands of ways I could make disturbingly cute pink monsters to evolve and take over planets.
And what did you turn into? A five hour marginally kind-of-cute waste of time. It was like ice cream instead of sex. Sweet, filling, but not exactly what I had been expecting. A friend of mine over at rulihe.com pretty much summed up Spore in her review of the game.
So seriously? What the hell happened? Why are you pushing increasingly less intelligent, half-finished, shitty games at us? You’re making it worse. In fact, all you are doing is creating a larger skeptical audience growing more leery to spend their money on another buck-eating waste of hard drive space.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Part of the problem is that, to answer your question, yes, game developers *are* trying to target 5 year olds—along with everyone else. The ‘casual’ gamer has become the majority and as a result, games are, in the opinion of real gamers like you and I, severely dumbed down. Which means that while casual gamers get to come in and try something new, the rest of us are left with games that are remarkably too easy.
The even bigger problem is that nowadays, most ‘hardcore’ gamers are all FPS players. Don’t get me wrong, I love FPS games and when F.E.A.R. 2 comes out, you won’t see me for at least a week…but FPS is not, nor should be, the be-all, end-all ‘hardcore’ game genre. What happened to the glorious days of the point-and-click adventure? When’s the last time we had a DECENT Castlevania game on a console? I’ll tell you when–1997, Symphony of the Night for PSX.
Game OverThinker recently did a video in which he states that the video game industry is, in his opinion, about to go down the tubes because it’s sort of doing to itself what the comic book industry did to itself in the 90’s: It basically black-holed itself by trying to make all of it’s comics ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’. I can’t disagree with him. There AREN’T any new, intuitive, original games anymore, because the VG industry has stopped targeting what should be it’s key audience: Kids.
I’m not saying games for adults shouldn’t be made, I’m just saying that the gaming industry needs to wake up and realize that there needs to be a middle ground between ’shooters’ and ‘games so easy that an idiot could play them’. The ‘casual’ game doesn’t target kids. That’s the problem. ‘Casual’ games target adults who’ve always looked at consoles with fear and dread, not understanding what they were meant to be.
TL;DR: Games suck today because VG companies are too interesting in lining their pockets instead of enjoying making challenging, INTERESTING games. It’s way cheaper to just throw a game together from a template, after all.
September 13th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I understand the need to make money. Without the money, they can’t pay the people who make the shiny game, to …make the shiny game.
And I don’t think that some of the latest releases were all that bad–had they really put some thought into what the hell they were doing BEFORE releasing them and realizing, “oh shit–everyone but these three guys says there’s a major game breaking bug. Let’s wait six months before fixing it. Add more bling, they’ll never notice!”
And on my end, I find that there’s no middle ground. Games are either simple enough for anyone, ages 1-100 to play, or so friggin hard to figure out you need to be a physicist.