Kyogissun said:
I just... I really don't have words. I did not realize that this shit as bad as it... was. I mean I was getting the jist of it from the reviews but, good god.
When was the last time this big of a disappointment happened for the gaming industry? Like... Driver 3 maybe? Or is there something else non-Aliens related I'm forgetting?
I seriously hope Gearbox is in some deep shit for this, they were probably one of the few remaining companies I felt weren't completely fucking up but with this... I seriously hope there's something that went terribly wrong and that this wasn't just the outcome of laziness.
It happens a lot actually, it's just that people tend not to notice unless it's a game they happen to be interested in or following. Being a big-budget FPS that had FPS junkies drooling due to the liscence attached to it and the cred Gearbox built up from "Borderlands" it's getting a lot more attention because it's comparitively mainstream.
To put things into perspective right alongside this, a company called Gazillion is in the hotseat. They are the ones making the "Marvel Heroes" MMO, which occasionally gets mentioned. They are basically running a "Marvel Ultimate Alliance" inspired MMO where you buy access to specific super heroes and run around in a top-down persistant world beating the crap out of legions of thugs. It's still under development and there have been articles and videos and stuff of it all over The Internet if you look, and it has come up here on "The Escapist".
What Gazillion did was offer people "founders deals" where if you paid to buy characters to play off of them early you'd get these super deals for early adoption. A pretty common gimmick. Well just now they decided to run a deal where they are giving away Jean Gray and Cyclops for free to anyone who buys any level of founder pack from them on Valentines day. This needless to say really slots off anyone who bought those characters specifically to see them being given away free as a promotion for a game that hasn't even come out yet. There is a bit of a storm about it on their forums, I wrote a few messages about it as well.
Then of course we had the entire "Mass Effect 3" contreversy which didn't entirely revolve around the ending just sucking, but that it sucked and was directly contridictory to promises made by the developers as the game was being created, with those promises and statements being used to promote the game. Then there was a "behind the scenes" app showing that the guys doing the game never actually intended for any of those promises to be met... and also a "you can't make crap like this up" bit explaining that the ending they decided to go with was basically coceived by like an
8 year old boy who wrote in to them. At the end of the day it wasn't as involved as a demo showing "this is what our game is" and then not delivering anything close, but it went into the same territory by having guys who are developers and should know their stuff coming out and saying "this will not be an A B or C choice ending", etc... A lot of people don't really get the anger surrounding Mass Effect 3, summarizing it simply as "rage over not liking the ending" doesn't quite cover why this got to be so much bigger than other products with endings people don't like.
Then of course we had "Duke Nukem Forever" and we see how close that product turned out to the promises made and what footage of the game we actually got to see. Gearbox was ALSO responsible for that, and there are already parallels being drawn here, given the information circulated, lies, fan exploitation, pre-order gimmicks, and everything else. I think Totalbiscuit made this parallel last night in a video he did talking about why you shouldn't pre-order. It's paticularly damning when you consider that this is twice we've more or less beeen looking at the same kind of garbage from the same company.
Then of course we have "Dragon Age 2" which wound up being a mess of brawler mechanics, reused maps, and laughably enough loading screens that instructed you with basic "RPG strategy" about using fighters to block for mages and stuff, when this wasn't even possible in the game given the way enemies dropped ninja like off of rooftops, and pretty much ran right past your characters with no effort, etc... almost like the guys writing those loading screens had no idea the game they were writing it for. This isn't even getting into the entire "Hawke contreversy" where Bioware asked the fans if it was okay to remove character generation and have Hawke always be a human in exchange for voice acting, the response was pretty resoundingly negative, but Bioware said it was positive and did their thing anyway.
Then of course we had "The War Z" a game that didn't even have a fraction of the features (character skills, etc..) promised in the game's advertisement page on STEAM... to name a few things. Leading to a whole laughable series of events not too long ago where the guys running the company were trying to weakly justify why they weren't liars.
The point is not to try and start a giga-post of refighting all these tired battles in one thread, but to point out that these contreversies exist, and happen constantly. People just tend to forget about them rapidly, or just don't care unless it involves a game they happen to like or are interested in. Pretty much every one of those examples above involves a gaming company telling, or showing, people one thing, and then delivering something entirely differant, followed by a titanic shitstorm. We keep seeing it because we let these guys get away with it. It's not like Gearbox did anything here that nobody else did, they just took it to another level, which isn't surprising since the sheer audacity on display here has been climbing for a while.
At the end of the day the same thing is likely to happen here. Your going to have fanboys, like the infamous Biodrones, come out to defend their favorite devs and IPs as mindlessly as possible, filling those devs with validation and taking this as a queue that they got away with it and they still have fans. Understand this isn't a crack just on Bioware fans, The War Z even has it's defenders, and crap.. at the end of the day Colonial Marines will have it's fanatical defenders, both of the game, and Borderlands fans rallying behind Gearbox. People not interested in the game the contreversy is about will sit back and laugh about it and call everyone on both sides idiots (up until it happens to a game they are interested in), and things will die down and then another company will pull a huge lie, and the same thing will happen again. Nothing will change because we will not stop them.
Ideally it would be a case where gamers in general would all thrown down against companies like EA/Bioware, Gearbox, Hammerpoint, and whomever else and show them what level "toxic" can be taken to, not just in expressed online (and snailmail) fury, but also by refusing to buy their products, any product, until they make good for the things they have already done. A situation where fanboys defending things like "Mass Effect 3" or "Colonial Marines" would be horribly singled out and pushed out by the rest of the gaming community as leperous pariahs, as everyone, interested in the games in question or not turned on them, and with pretty much one voice we could tell the gaming industry to get it's crap together, and see lies like we've been seeing actually ruin companies as opposed to providing a five minute uproar on message boards and maybe the gaming press.
Of course it's not an ideal world, so we're not going to see that happen. We'll all get POed about "Colonial Marines", noise will be made. When "Borderlands 3" comes out Gearbox will make a fortune, few will care anymore, and those that do will be shouted down by the "I luv Borderlands, the games were good, why should I care because Colonial Marines was crappy?" crowd, missing the entire point that it's the same company, issues like this aren't about the specific product label.
Such are my thoughts.
