Don’t get me wrong. There are many recent trends in gaming that I really love. Aiming down sights? It makes kills more accurate and satisfying. Sandbox worlds? Under the right circumstances, they allow you to get totally lost in a game. But the thing is, there are way too much trends in our industry, new and old, that just absolutely need to go. For example...
#5: DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT
Those not familiar with DRM can go here (http://bit.ly/4GiiiG), but to the anyone else, the three above words make up one of the ugliest phrases in the entertainment industry. Of course, piracy doesn’t do much good to any industry, and I’m not a huge proponent of it, but with DRM, it seems like big companies like the MPAA just want to punish everybody instead of making the effort to focus just on pirates. Nobody likes DRM (except all the industry bigwigs), and it’s really, really high time it got up and quit. In fact, many media companies (like Apple) claim that their games/videos/songs are “DRM-free” just to rack up more sales. It’s no wonder those services are more popular than those with DRM. Sorry entertainment industry, but DRM has got to high-tail it out of here.
#4: THE GLUT OF SEQUELS
How many of you actually got excited when the words “Halo 4” flashed on the screen at Microsoft’s E3 press conference this year? I didn’t. I didn’t get excited for “Gears of War 3” either. Or “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3”. Or “Dance Central 2”. Or “Kinect Sports Season 2”. Or “Forza Motorsport 4”. Or “Fable: the Journey”. Or “Halo Anniversary”. Or... well, you get the idea.
You see how bad this is? Even Hollywood doesn’t churn out as many sequels. There were very, very few original games at E3 this year, and the gaming industry doesn’t realize that if all we get is sequels, sooner or later gamers are going to get sick of all these games. After all, wasn’t that what happened with the “Guitar Hero” franchise? I’m not saying we should abandon sequels completely, but I am saying that we need to cut some of them down and just get some original ideas going.
#3: THE OVERRELIANCE ON GRAPHICS AND “HARDCORE GAMING”
Wanna know what my favorite console was this generation? Hint one: It’s not the PS3. Hint two: It’s not the 360, either. Hint 3: IT’S THE WII. Wanna know why? It’s because it was original. Unique. The games on it were actually intriguing. Games like “No More Heroes” and “Red Steel 2” (which is an actually good sequel, just so I don’t look like a hypocrite) couldn’t have been possible on 360 or PS3. Games were actually interesting, original, and most importantly, different. You also had first-party games like “Super Mario Galaxy” and “Metroid Prime 3” that also couldn’t have been done on any other console. Sure, PS3 and 360 had traditional controllers, and better graphics, but many of the games were just the same old, same old. My point is, what game companies need to understand these days is that at this point, graphics aren’t everything. I don’t think they can get much better than this anyway.
#2: LIVES AND GAME OVERS
I just know that I’m going to sound like a huge sissy for saying this, but hear me out. Lives and the phrase “Game Over” have always been a part of the video game lexicon. But now we have no excuse to have them now. Nothing. Zip. Nada. A game with a finite number of lives and continues is no longer called “hard”, it’s now called “frustrating”. The only reason I ever tried to play “Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels” is because it was the SNES “All-Stars” version and you could save anytime you wanted.
For an example of how the game industry could do it right from now on, let’s look at a popular indie game called “Limbo”. In “Limbo”, whenever your character dies, you start again right before you died. That’s it. No lives, no game over. Just the game. It’s perfect, and helps draw you into the experience. Now if only we could get every new game to do this, then gaming would be less of a chore, and more of, well, a game.
#1: BUGS, CRASHES, PATCHES, GLITCHES, ETC.
This is this gaming generation’s Achilles Heel. I can understand if a PC game crashes or has bugs, because everyone’s PC is different. But everyone’s console is the same. We know what parts are in it. We know how to optimize games for it. So why do we need to release a console game to the public if said game is nearly broken in every way? It’s just f***ing ridiculous.
The PS3 versions of “The Orange Box” and “Fallout 3” were all but unplayable when they first released, and they had to be patched a few weeks after their releases. But why couldn’t you playtest it first and make sure everything works on day one? Your customers are not testers, they are actual consumers paying you good money for a finished game, not an incomplete one. Hell, that’s part of the reason Nintendo’s online experience isn’t as robust as the competition. They want to make sure only good (or at least complete) games are released on Wii, DS, and 3DS.
We shouldn’t even have to ask the industry to do this for us. Imagine if you went to see a movie, only to find that that there was no sound in two or three scenes. Imagine if you went to grab a burger from a fast food joint, only to find that it hasn’t been cooked. Seriously, our industry really needs to get their act together on this one, more than any of the other issues on this list.
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