Blowing Away the Triple-A
- Thread starter Dennis Scimeca
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That is an excellent point. On the game reviews panel I moderated at PAX Prime this year, the idea came up that innovation may be generally more important to critics than to the audience. If the only game you buy every year is the annual Call of Duty iteration than perhaps the sameness which is beginning to gall critics is precisely everything you WANT in the game!ranger19 said:
I think you are correct in that the boredom which hits critics early is something that eventually hits the consumers as well. I have plenty of friends, who could care F-all for game journalism and who don't really keep up with the larger scheme of things, who are sick and tired of Call of Duty because it's pretty much the same thing every year, and they haven't bought a new one since Modern Warfare 2. I can't honestly say they've missed very much, either.
It would be very easy to make that argument, absolutely. In fact, that's kind of what I was thinking when I first started writing this, but it goes beyond FPS games. I would argue that it's more about genres than a specific genre. There are a couple new dungeon crawlers coming out soon and Diablo III felt really played to me. There are two Mario platformers on the horizon and at least one prominent critic is arguing that Nintendo needs to give Mario a rest already. Open world games are beginning to feel a little dime-a-dozen.lancar said:
FPS games, being some of the most visible and popular games in the industry are an easy scapegoat and target, but if we think of "triple-A" as "mainstream, lowest-common-denominator" gaming that relies as much or more on marketing than the intrinsic appeal of the software itself to sell units, then The Problem goes way beyond FPS, I think.
I, personally, think "the problem" lays actually with the AAA model and business practices surrounding AAA games. When one has share holders, design by commitee and the bottom line being the over riding concerns for what is a creative endeavor then one ends up with samey and hollow experiences. This is mainly because no risk is taken. I mean, how could risk be taken when the ultimate goal is to play it as safe as possible to protect quarterly earning statements, profit and loss sheets and stock prices?
Hey, I'll play the AAA games (later, at a discount), but I don't feel that in any way means I can't sneer at them, any more than I can't sneer at Expendables 2 after seeing it on cable. Edit: I have not yet seen it. But... odds are good.
That said, I'm expecting great things from Borderlands 2 and maybe Assassin's Creed 3. Hope they've got that spark. Especially if Ubisoft keeps its promise and doesn't cripple AC3 with DRM again.
That said, I'm expecting great things from Borderlands 2 and maybe Assassin's Creed 3. Hope they've got that spark. Especially if Ubisoft keeps its promise and doesn't cripple AC3 with DRM again.
Sorry I'm late to respond, but ha, glad I make sense!Dennis Scimeca said:That is an excellent point. On the game reviews panel I moderated at PAX Prime this year, the idea came up that innovation may be generally more important to critics than to the audience. If the only game you buy every year is the annual Call of Duty iteration than perhaps the sameness which is beginning to gall critics is precisely everything you WANT in the game!ranger19 said:
I think you are correct in that the boredom which hits critics early is something that eventually hits the consumers as well. I have plenty of friends, who could care F-all for game journalism and who don't really keep up with the larger scheme of things, who are sick and tired of Call of Duty because it's pretty much the same thing every year, and they haven't bought a new one since Modern Warfare 2. I can't honestly say they've missed very much, either.
Yeah, the first time I realized the critics/consumers divide was a while back when MovieBob was critiquing some movie for being very uninspiring and uncreative. It was a movie I had actually seen before seeing his review, and I remember thinking that it felt great and inspiring to me, and realized it's because I don't see nearly as many movies as he has. And that can/does only happen more with games, which have much higher time/monetary costs.
Glad to see that you still read/respond to comments; your articles continue to be one of my favorite new(ish) parts of this site.
I think we'd all be a lot happier if games would have a concept of being finished. All of the best games I can think of are either very short series or simply a single game; the soul reaver series ended with defiance because the story was not going to go any further. It was finished and no more needed to be done.
There is not a sense of this nowadays, a series will go on and on regardless of story or making sense, as long as it can still make money.
This doesn't happen so much in other mediums, and the few examples where it has have gone horribly. Look at friday the 13th, or hellraiser, taking a classic film and beating the dead horse until everyone thinks the entire series is awful.
We don't need another call of duty, another battlefield, another tomb raider, another dead space, another assassin's creed, another blah blah blah. They need to learn when to call it a day before they're just beating the horse's bones.
There is not a sense of this nowadays, a series will go on and on regardless of story or making sense, as long as it can still make money.
This doesn't happen so much in other mediums, and the few examples where it has have gone horribly. Look at friday the 13th, or hellraiser, taking a classic film and beating the dead horse until everyone thinks the entire series is awful.
We don't need another call of duty, another battlefield, another tomb raider, another dead space, another assassin's creed, another blah blah blah. They need to learn when to call it a day before they're just beating the horse's bones.