Blogs The games industry needs to learn when to let things end

What good work might that be? As far as I can see, all Bioware have done in the past decade is ruin every franchise they own.

Ok, maybe "ruin" is a bit strong, but let's be real here - None of the Dragon Age sequels lived up to the original (Alistair 4 lyfe!), Mass Effect became an almost comical mess by time they were finished with it, and while the time and money spent on the Old Republic MMO should have went towards a KoToR sequel, it's probably best it didn't... lest we all suffer yet more disappointment.

 

Mass Effect ended at three*, as far as I'm concerned.

* Actually, probably around two point eight, because I keep getting my ass kicked by Kai Leng and then I leave the game alone for a couple of weeks, before picking it up and getting my ass kicked again.

 

This is a missed opportunity for a much deeper debate, namely Ludology vs Narratology.

A great story simply isn't required for a good game - Doom is something about Hell and Mars, Mario concerns a plumber rescuing a princess from a mutated lizard, and I still don't know what on earth Dota 2 is about despite it being the most played game in my library. These are not RPG's admittedly, but I still don't think finality of story has anything to do with it. The original Star Wars trilogy was a self-contained story. After the prequels we hoped no one would go back to that well until Ep. 7 was released to critical and popular acclaim. Almost any story can be extended, updated or reimagined, and if memory serves correctly the whole point of the Mass Effect story was that it's cyclical.

I completely agree that a cohesive ludo-narrative structure needs time to cook. Much like food - It's ready when it's ready, but "End" is too strong a word otherwise we would have never have got to play Half-Life...oh.

 

No, the game industry needs to stop sucking up to teenage console kids and multiplayer bull crap just for the sake of popularity. Certain games are great for multiplayer. Most role-playing type games are purely good for single player Endeavors and should be that way. Adding multi-player tie ins and crap like that just ruins the game. Mass Effect Andromeda was an amazing game even with the issues that it had. It just needed some Polish. The story was great and the combat was fantastic. The only reason people hated it is because they read reviews of other people that hated it and it jaded their opinion of what the game actually was. We're talking about people that have been conditioned by the media to believe what they hear and not what they do or what is done. That is what is ruined the gaming industry. Idiots like that. Everybody's entitled to their opinion of course but there is a reason why I never look at a review and only look at the basic summary of the game itself. That way my opinion is not jaded in any way whatsoever by anyone or anything. I have enjoyed games I would have never liked if I would have watched review or read one. The difference is I'm self-aware enough to know that things like that change our opinions drastically and even our mood and mental state when it comes to something like that. No matter how much we say it doesn't. It's ridiculous and these morons need to keep their mouths shut and game studios need to stop catering to the nonsensical crap that they have been. Battlefield 1942 was a prime example. Fantastic game fantastic single player. Battlefield one? It's a great game but I finish the single-player campaign in two hours. Playing slowly. I'll because they wanted to suck the genitals of whiny little teenage zit faces so they can scream at each other over microphones and multiplayer games like prepubescent little idiots. Stop with the bull crap and actually go back to the roots of good gaming. The Elder Scrolls Arena. I swapped out floppy disks for days and days playing that game back in the mid 90s. It was all about the story and all about the gameplay. It wasn't about music or some squealy little YouTube f**ktard whining like the breeding pig he is. Go back to gameplay go back to character development stay away from musical Interruption and multiplayer nonsense. There are plenty of multiplayer games out there that are fantastic. Heck make separate games, that way all those console kids can play Battlefield with all their little buddies or adults can also and still enjoy an actual single player game with amazing character and storyline development.

 

Dude, go have a latte. Relaaaaax.

 

i'll get around to playing andromeda, the setting and concept never really clicked for me TBH, but i would LOVE more mass effect games as i love the universe they have created for it even if shepherd et al never return (infact i kinda hope they don't, as you say that story has been told). You are completely right that the games industry tries to flog a dead horse, then release a zombie mode and flog an undead horse as DLC but because they put out a crap game doesn't mean the concept should be abandoned, just done properly next time - a lesson assassin's creed and CoD should learn but never will as they make huge amounts of money with iterative annual releases to the stifling of all other innovation ("oh what about putting spaceships in", "yeah sure why not", "any other new ideas ?", "nah we have our one new thing for this game")

at the end of the day consumers have no-one to blame but themselves if the biggest earners re-use engines, concepts & gameplay and get churned out every year and they keep buying them anyway.

 

So what you're saying is Valve are right to leave us hanging with no more Half Life?...

 

he's saying valve should release a f2p halflife 2: zombies multiplayer update with levelling up of classes & loot boxes to get the best weapon skins, which can ofc be traded & sold on steam market.

minimum effort, maximum reward.

 

There are plenty of games that avoid those problems, expand your horizon beyond the big budget releases of EA, Activision and Ubisoft.

 

I see, you want all games to be made and run, the way you want them to be and anyone who dares to want something different is a whining kid? Perhaps you would be more at home on a UKIPers forum.

 

The whole industry has to cater to "insert demand of choice here", don't you know that doing 30 seconds of research what a game is like before buying it summons Cthulhu?

 

Well I'm on her(e) quite a lot.

Edit: FWIW MP online have their place, i've enjoyed online BF and GTA more than the SP and i'm way beyond teenage years. Love my SP RPGs too. To say either is or is not for a specific group is just nonsense.

 

I had to look-up Cthulhu...

I only answer to The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

 

There's still the milkman.

Development appears to be pressganged by what the publisher thinks will make them money. Regardless of how long the idea for the game that made them money was baking. Everyone looking at Mass Effect says "Bioware knows how to tell a story" and I, frankly, don't entirely agree.

Generally, KOTOR is pointed at as a reason Bioware knows left from right, up from down, with RPG's - But KOTOR relies heavily on the Star Wars Universe. It's an established canon that has had twenty, thirty, years to percolate.

I don't know, and who does apart from the writers, how long Mass Effect was stewing in the background. I doubt it was overnight, I also doubt it was the three years between ME3 releasing and MEA being announced. MEA feels like ME1, to me, with a story written by people so heavily influenced by the original ME story that it is impossible to escape the idea that EA sat Montreal's team down and said "Make us Mass Effect 1-3 again, you've got ten minutes." My arguments for that include;

The ****ing Mako. That piece of **** ruined Mass Effect for me. It made me stop playing, and only years later did I persevere and find out what a gem the series was. The Nomad took all my complaints about the Mako and made them go away. (Example of 20/20 hindsight fixing the problem - Montreal had the entire series to look at, critical reception and all, and pick what fans liked best).

The animation and scene direction is just.. So violently hit and miss. I enjoyed the game, I overlooked its foibles and failures because as a whole I found the game enjoyable. However, in cutscenes and occasionally moving, the animation feels like the person in charge was given an allotted time to make the whole repertoire of animations, and ran out of time to do any re-do's. The cut scenes were, generally, okay - Save for the well documented characters disappearing between another character and the infinite beyond, and the frequently 'flat' faces that result from a lack of mocap. (Example of a new team thrust into a level of responsibility and management they simply do not have an understanding of)

The story! Oh god the story. It plays almost exactly like ME1. There are some 'differences' but they're really not that different. A complaint I saw a lot was how you were 'chosen' within the first X minutes. As if people forget that Shepard was chosen in the same space of time. Almost shot for shot. Except this time there was an actual parent there, instead of a surrogate father and a weird, creepy, uncle. (Montreal recognised how Edmonton set the stage for ME1-3, and tried to replicate it. How well they managed it is, obviously, subjective - But I personally feel that MEA was almost identical to ME1 with scene setting)

The bleeding load screen disguises. That everyone said weren't load screen disguises. That, when patched, appeared to depend on PC speed as to when you could skip the bloody animation. Does no one remember the overlong .bik sequences in ME1? That froze if your PC was too slow, before the next scene? Does no one remember the elevator scenes that got inexplicably shorter as PC hardware improved? Same ****, different day.

I disagree that things need to have a traditional start and end - I think, instead, there needs to be less of a rush to get good games to market.

Edit: As for the MP/SP debate. There are merits to both. Trying to shoehorn one into the other doesn't necessarily work. If one lends itself to the other, sure. If it's so far removed as to make no sense, make an exclusive game one way or the other. Imagine how Overwatch would have been with a halfassed SP and a halfassed MP. Whole ass one thing. If there's spare time, then perhaps consider half assing a second thing.

 

I find this particularly interesting - unless I'm playing with a friend (and therefore chatting, joking etc.) I can't stand multiplayer. It doesn't give enough of a return of investment on my time! I much prefer a more guaranteed, excellent single-player experience. The problem of course arises when I look over my games library and can't decide which of the half-dozen games on my list that I want to play!