Hello everyone! Your resident negative nancy/angry bastard is back to give you further incite into the worst that gaming has to offer, specifically what it had to offer for this year.
Now in my personal opinion this year has been a colossal disappointment and has made me extremely nervous for the video game industry going forward, sure it wasn’t all bad and I do intend to write a Best Gaming Trends in 2012 very soon, but that is an article for another day.
So without further adieu, here are my worst gaming trends in 2012, enjoy!
DLC ABUSE (Disc-Locked Content, Day 1 DLC, Console Exclusive DLC)
Never has there been a year where the abuse of DLC for the purpose of ripping off customers and generally treating them like goddamn animals been more apparent. Downloadable content was created so that developers/publishers could sell small or big chunks of content from any where between free to 20 dollars to give post launch content so gamers would play games longer and profit could be made from a game over a longer period of time, seems like a win, win situation right?
Wrong! Throughout this entire generation most of the developers and publishers have shown that they have no clue as to how to do DLC properly, but this year the issue was further exacerbated by the efforts of two publishers in particular, EA, Capcom and Bethesda.
Mass Effect 3 was the big OMFG game of the year hands down, it was hyped up, it was the end of this huge, epic storyline that would change depending on all your choices throughout the entire trilogy, well im not here to talk about the Extended Cut DLC (which was a good thing and it was free and optional) im here to talk about the day 1 DLC where you had to pre order the game to get access to Prothean companion.
For those of you not well versed in the ME lore, the Prothean race plays a massive role in the games story and having a Prothean companion could give nerds like me and many others throughout the world, valuable knowledge and background about an era of the ME universe we never really got to know, so EA took it out of the finished game and made it a DLC pack….
True Bioware attempted to hide this by saying OH WE DIDNT CUT IT OUT OF THE FINISHED GAME! Well considering the fact that a good number of the DLC’s files were already on the finished game disk and since the game hadn’t gone gold until early February, you did cut it out EA and don’t try to make us believe other wise.
Next on the list is Capcom, a company that has become synonymous with shady business practices, treating the fans like complete and utter dog crap and running good series into the ground, but we can always count on them to rip us off with DLC and so they did with Street Fighter X Tekken, a title that started a long line of Capcom related DLC controversy that only grew as time passed on.
For those of you who were living under a rock, and trust me its one worth living under, got to experience the great fighting game Street Fighter X Tekken in all its glory! Until hackers managed to unlock over 12 characters that were on the disk, but Capcom locked them out and on July 21st made them available for 20 bucks as DLC!!!
If we, the consumers already paid the full 60 dollar price for the disk, then we deserve all the content that’s on the goddamn disk! Imagine if you bought a car at the full price of 30 000 dollars, got it and found out you had to pay a 1000 more dollars to get the engine, even though the engine was in the car when you were purchasing it.
This caused a media shit storm and it was the straw the smashed the camels’ back with a sledge hammer, you’d think Capcom would learn from this and try to avoid such further incidents, right? WRONG!!! Not a few days later another Capcom did it again with another title Asuras Wrath by selling the last three chapters of the game as the True Ending DLC for 7 dollars!!!
As a long time gamer I felt sick and ashamed to be part of an industry where big publishers can just take out chunks of a finished product, and sell it later for some more money after we already paid the full retail price for the product, and to some acid on the injury they announced this True Ending DLC in the middle of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy that was at its peak at that the time.
For the finale I saved Bethesda and it pains me to have to put them on here since Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time, but they’re timed exclusive DLC deal with Microsoft was a clear slap in the face to the biggest Bethesda fans (PC users) and to the people Bethesda royally screwed over with the god awful PS3 version of Skyrim.
I already addressed in great detail that Microsoft just does these deals just to compensate for the fact that they have no exclusive series left on the Xbox 360 in my previous article, but it just boggles my mind as to why Bethesda would agree to this? Skyrim was one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful games of this entire generation, so I ask again, why?
So here’s how these deals work, Microsoft offers developers god knows how much cash and should they accept, the developers must release the DLC on the 360 and keep it exclusive to that system for a certain period of time, once that time has passed they can release the DLC on the other systems without Microsoft changing all their operating systems to Windows 8 as punishment.
But that’s not all Bethesda messed up on, they have stated on numerous occasions that the DLC may never, ever come to the PS3 due to the fact that the console is hard to program for and could potentially break the game even more, considering the thing is a slideshow and nigh unplayable as it is, the DLC making the problems even more severe is a scary scenario indeed.
Now the excuse for the previously mentioned PS3 issues might have worked if this was 2006 or 2007 when excuses like these were being thrown around and held actual weight, but this is 2012! There are dozens upon dozens of third party releases a year for the PS3 that work just fine, so how about you admit that you have no clue as to how to program for the console and stop releasing broken, buggy versions of your game for it and spare us, the consumers of your incompetence.
That last part wont happen because if Bethesda are greedy enough to fill their coppers with more gold by agreeing to the exclusive DLC deal with Microsoft, I don’t think it bothers them in the least to release broken versions of their game on a console they don’t know how to program for, money is money anyway and they’ve more than proven this year that’s all they care about now.
MORE HORRIBLE KINECT GAMES
A wise man once perfectly described the Kinect; he said and I quote “Kinect is the biggest pile o shiet that’s been created in the gaming world since the Sega 32X. It sucks and fails on every level possible.”
Well said anonymous wise man, well said….. But in all honesty if this year hasn’t proven that the Kinect is terrible and that developers can’t even make barely functioning games for it, then I don’t know what could.
Some of the worst games ever produced were made specifically for the Kinect this year, such gems like Star Wars Kinect, Steel Battalion and DBZ Kinect were all broken, over priced, boring as a 12 hour documentary about dirt and terrible bastardizations of their respective franchises.
Steel Battalion fans in particular are screwed since this latest entry pretty much killed any and all hope for another, proper Steel Battalion game for at least another decade, DBZ and Star Wars haven’t had good games in about 5 years so and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that these new ones ended up just as horrible as the ones before.
And the worst thing about Kinect this year was that Microsoft didn’t announce that they were discontinuing its production, that they had shipped all units in a facility in New Mexico and nuked it with 3000 nuclear war heads, erasing it from existence.
OVERHYPED, DISSAPOINTING AAA GAMES
I don’t think Im exaggerating when I say that 95% of the big games this year were either: crap, mediocre, overhyped disappointments or the same game slapped on with a fresh coat of paint to make it look new and shinny.
Games such as Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City, Boderlands 2, Assassins Creed 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Resident Evil 6,…. All were hyped up the ass and in the end not only failed to deliver any of the promises made, but also brought a few series closer to permanent extinction (RES and MoH).
As the title suggests the reasons why these games fell so far and snapped their necks upon hitting the floor was the hype behind each one, this is an issue that games industry is facing, the industry is doing the Peter Molyneux thing where all this features are mentioned, all these promises are made like AN EPIC STORYLINE THAT CHANGES WITH YOUR DECISIONS! Or A MASSIVE OPEN WORLD IN THE WILDERNESS!
So essentially everyone is acting like Peter Molyneux now, before some of you fanboys try to assassinate me (yes I can see the red dot of your sniper rifle on my head Bob) I have nothing but respect for the man and I do think that he is an intelligent and ambitious man, who just cant keep his goddamn mouth shut when he should.
Everyone is in a way following in his foot steps by promising so much and making a big deal out of things that in the finished product are underwhelming, pointless or are cut out completely, here are a few examples if you don’t believe.
Assassins Creed 3 promised that it would be a true step forward for the series by letting you do all sorts of cool parkour stuff out in the wilderness, a new engine, a new setting with a new main protagonist who would have ties to both sides of the revolutionary war and the end of the Desmond story line, sounds pretty awesome when I say it like this.
But the game ended up having an engine with muddy and ugly textures and piss poor draw distances, oh and I can’t forget about the bugs, a main protagonist that’s a boring face palm causing stereotypical Native American with such a monotone voice the robot GLaDOS from Portal has more personality than him, a setting that is mostly wasted as the huge ground battles are incredibly limited and scripted AND an ending which pretty much makes all your previous efforts pointless and goes against everything the previous entries tried to tell you about life and the way to live your life.
I could do this for all the games listed above, but I won’t since I think my AC3 rant proved the point I was trying to make, so there you go guys, the worst gaming trends in 2012.
What did you guys think of this year? Was it as bad as I think it was or were you too busy enjoying the great indie games to even notices this stuff?
Loading ...