Ubisoft

I must admit, I was a little disappointed by the lack of Mr. Caffeine this year, but I was rather happy to see the appearance of Tobuscus. He had that vague sense of comedy terribleness that Mr. Caffeine brought and continued Ubisoft’s fantastically baffling tradition of injecting slightly-off comedy performances into their press conferences every year. In fact considering this was an Ubisoft affair I thought Aisha Tyler got away relatively unscathed; a little manufactured interest here, a comment about “girl wood” there, but apart from that not too bad.

Much like with EA though, my expectations were not through the roof here, so when the whole thing started with a Flo Rida performance promoting Just Dance 4 it wasn’t terribly surprising for me. Fortunately, from then on things started really looking up. In Far Cry 3 the gameplay looked solid, I was intrigued by the whole “insanity” theme, and the world it was set in was irresistibly vibrant. Visually, it might be the most striking game of E3 and it’s always good to see a modern FPS with a splash of colour.

The new Rayman was also a very picturesque game, and I wasn’t expecting the whole rhythm-platforming section, I thought that looked really good. It’s cool to see big companies doing some original and really fun-looking things with platformers in this day and age, and that looks like one of the few real gems we’ve seen on Wii U from the conference.

Assassin’s Creed III certainly stood up as a very strong game and after what has seemed like a slightly depressing attempt to squeeze what they could out of the franchise post-AC2, it’s encouraging to see Ubisoft releasing another Assassin’s Creed which is up to the standard we’ve come to expect from the series. In particular I liked the way the change from cities to a more rural area altered not only the environment the player explores, but also the way the player interacts with the environment. Good stuff.

However, then came perhaps the oddest part of the conference; a professional ShootMania match which was apparently entirely staged, and in fact consisted of footage from a tournament held before the show. The act of trying to force an e-sport seemed a bit dislikeable to begin with, but add in the weird “battle of the sexes” element, the whole female team being dressed in hotpants, and then Ubisoft trying to deceive the crowd into thinking they’re seeing something they’re not, and it all created a rather unpleasant air. As for the game itself, I can’t say it looked particularly appealing. Even considering it was an alpha build there’s a certain standard of presentation that I don’t feel it met and it neither looked like a shooter from 2012, nor seemed to trump retro shooters in any particular way either. Still, tell us we can have our own custom playlists on servers and they might have something.

Finally, Watch Dogs was of course the game that really blew everyone away. I think some people have been a little quick to guarantee it a complete success, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the game, like how much freedom we’ll have in the way we can tackle missions, but from what they showed it has the potential to be something fantastic. It touches on an interesting real-world issue, it shows a new but empowering way to tackle challenges, and it looks very sleek. I can’t wait to see more of it.

Sony

So this may be a little off-topic but this seems as good a time as any to talk about the audiences at E3’s press conferences. I know it’s something the Giant Bomb staff touched on in one of their videos, but since basically the start of E3 it’s been confusing me, it is my E3 mystery if you will. How are there so many people in the crowds excited for Internet Explorer and Bing, and swaying along to Usher? In the case of Sony specifically there were people in the audience who were not journalists or part of the industry, but got in because they lined up early for the conference, and I had heard some people there won contests to get in, but in the other conferences were there really that many Microsoft or Ubisoft or EA employees in the crowd to generate that kind of buzz? If there were that’s kind of strange, and if there weren’t then as Alex put it, who are these people? Regardless though, the level of excitement for brutal and merciless pain being inflicted on characters was a bit over the top even by video game standards. Crowds are strange.

Getting back to the conference, Sony’s included a little more talking and a little less demoing than I would have preferred, but as with the other companies this year, among their line-up were some very promising games. They got things started commendably with Beyond: Two Souls, and while it’s still not entirely clear what Beyond is as a game, I can’t help but have a certain admiration for what Cage is doing. Cinematically the game is definitely breaking boundaries.

I’m still not quite sure what to make of Playstation All-Stars. For all the talk that these kind of games seem to inspire about how all games copy from other games, I can’t help but feel that here Sony is copying way more than is the norm. What’s more, I don’t feel like the characters Sony are presenting fit together in one game as well as Nintendo’s characters and I just can’t conjure up the same attachment for characters like Kratos or Fat Princess as I can for Mario or Link, but then I guess I’ve never been much of a Sony gamer. While the crazy on-screen action could also be one of the game’s greatest strengths, I felt like it held back the demo a little. Even with a commentator it was hard to keep track of the game, but none the less it looks like a well-crafted game that could pay homage to some great titles for those particularly into the PS3.

I thought Assassin’s Creed: Liberation looked pretty cool, and showed off the hardware capabilities of the Vita well. In Assassin’s Creed III’s second showing, the visuals still looked great and I must admit I am a sucker for old-timey ships, I just hope they don’t steer too stiffly as has been the case with naval warfare in a lot of games. Far Cry 3’s co-op looked like a fine offering in every regard, but then came WonderBook.

Watching it back the demo of that game took a lot less time than it felt like it took, and yet I’m not sure that’s really a good thing. In its defence I suppose it is a clever way to try and come up with something new in the motion control space, especially as Microsoft are so against the idea of having physical objects as part of their motion control experience, and kids are unpredictable, maybe they’ll really enjoy it if it gets the right support. None the less the not-Harry Potter demo was certainly one of this year’s low points. Poor, poor WonderBook.

The new God of War seemed to have a really nice flow to it and looked fun, but I do worry that it’s going to give diminishing returns for anyone who’s been following the series. I don’t see them doing much new and after the epic battles of God of War III and the amount of Greek mythology they’ve exhausted, I wonder where they can take it while still keeping the series as much of a hit as it has been.

On the up side, the closer for the show was something to behold. Much like Tomb Raider, the Last of Us managed to crack through our cold indifference to violence and show us something gritty and jarringly visceral. The usual route games take to presenting a dark and troubling world is making the environment, enemies, and the actions of the enemies seem gruesome and ugly, but I think there’s just as much, if not more to be said for a game that make the player carry out gruesome and ugly actions themselves. I don’t know how it’ll play, but the Last of Us presented a world that was wonderfully merciless and a pair of characters with a lot of potential. Overall, some very nice things from Sony.

So it’s day 2 of E3 and we’re already more than halfway through. With all the excitement that I get from this time of the year I’m going to be genuinely sad to see it go, but it’s been excellent while it’s lasted. The list of games I’m excited for is so long it’s ridiculous and I know plenty of other people have enjoyed the show, so in that spirit I thought I’d take a customary look back at the press conferences. Here are my self-indulgent reflections on Microsoft and EA.

Microsoft

It was great to see Microsoft open so strong with Halo 4. The level they showed was somewhat reminiscent of the first level of Halo 3, but it was encouraging to see 343 bring at least something new to the table. I wasn’t entirely sold on the enemy designs, but the graphics looked great, they managed to mix up the gameplay, and it was all-round a really impressive look at the game.

The Blacklist demo showed a Splinter Cell going for a rather different style this time round, and it looks like it has some potential. Like Halo 4 it had some really well-crafted animation, and while I’ve never been a big fan of the games, they do seem to be taking it in a more action-oriented direction I could get into, I only hope that stealth games aren’t a genre we see die out entirely. The Kinect support seems a little unnecessary, but at least it’s unintrusive if nothing else.

Like a lot of people I tuned out a little throughout Microsoft’s sports game showcase, but it didn’t seem as though they were doing anything particularly new, and I do have to wonder how much of the sports game crowd really care that much about using Kinect in their games, but hey, maybe that’s a thing. The trailer for the new Gears of War showed fine, however, I was a little surprised by the lack of any kind of demo, and having played three Gears games already this generation, I’m not sure I’m quite ready for another.

The subsequent slew of media apps shown was something I expected after the way Microsoft have handled such things in previous years, although the section dragged on far too long, and as Gizmodo points out they do seem to be giving customers a bit of a raw deal by making them pay for Xbox LIVE Gold to access the ability to then pay for additional streaming services. While the Kinect content also wasn't particularly exhilarating, I must say I was expecting more of it than they showed, and the Kinect fitness game looked like a Kinect fitness game, but at least we were free of creepy plastic families dancing up and down in artificial living rooms this year. The Smartglass section, again, too lengthy, but it looks like they really have something there and it is a clever way to combat Nintendo’s Wii U. Fortunately, things got a lot more exciting when Tomb Raider got its stage demo.

Video games are often so much about empowerment that we’re used to seeing a protagonist be able to just pick up a gun and start mowing down hordes of enemies without breaking a sweat, so to see a character that even later into the game, is still struggling to progress through the world, is refreshing. While running through a jungle getting shot at is something we’d consider par for the course in another game, and is something we’ve become largely desensitised to, Tomb Raider gives a great sense that Lara really is going through hell, perhaps to the point where the level they showed was a little ridiculous, but it was still effective in what it did. Using environmental hazards to take out enemies also looks like great fun and the whole section they showed had a really fantastic flow to it. I hope that game turns out as good as it looks.

I can’t say I’ve been a big fan of Resident Evil but the demo for RE6 seemed fine and Capcom certainly made true on their promise of making things more actiony this time round. Wreckateer didn’t look like a game I’d particularly want to pay money for, but for a Kinect demo it was reasonably inoffensive. I’m a little sceptical of what the quality of the new South Park game will be like, but visually it’s absolutely spot-on and it was cool to see Stone and Parker take to the stage to speak earnestly about what they’d created. I’m rather surprised that with all the complaints about things during the press conferences that weren’t to do with games, the Usher performance got the kind of appraisal it did, but it’s still great to see Harmonix being given the opportunity to do what they do with Dance Central 3.

Finally, when it came to the Black Ops II demo, I thought the “sniper section” they showed was a big mistake for a live press conference, but it’s cool to see people trying to do something a little different with the CoD series, and the chunk of the game they showed, much like a lot of the recent CoDs, did a good job of making you feel like you were seeing a frantic warzone unfold before you. Altogether, I thought it was a pretty great conference, even if the whole “Showing Xbox as a complete media platform” element seems to be getting a bigger and bigger part of these pressings.

EA

I really wasn't sure what to think of EA’s showing of Dead Space 3. I don’t think co-op in Dead Space is necessarily the huge negative that some people have painted it to be; it may be inherently less scary, but I see no reason why the series can’t present a less scary multiplayer mode alongside a more horror focused single-player. However, if the quick flash of moments from the game they showed before the demo is anything to go by, it looks like they could be taking away one of the biggest strengths of Dead Space by sacrificing the creepy, claustrophobic corridors for large, open spaces. I hope that isn’t the case.

The demo of Madden 13 was a little weird, but I can at least appreciate that they didn’t consume vast amounts of the conference this year re-showing sports games from Microsoft’s presser. As for SimCity Social I think it would be easy to dismiss it as just another Facebook game, and I suspect it will have all those same problems we’re used to of social games wanting you to spend real money or drag in friends to advance, but it looks like they may have something deeper and more fleshed-out than a lot of social networking games. It’ll be at least interesting to see the final product.

It was the “SimCity” SimCity that really shone though. I must say I didn’t expect to come away from EA’s conference so excited about a management sim. It’s always great to see a game that differs from the norm of what games portray but still looks like great fun, and I think it would be a real shame if we lost what a franchise like SimCity can bring us. With all the messing about Maxis have done for the past few years with shallower, more easily accessible versions of Will Wright’s games, it’s great to see them come back to one and make something that looks like it will really appeal to the “core” crowd. This is the exact kind of thing which makes me wish I had a more powerful PC.

The Battlefield 3 content, I have mixed feelings about. It’s cool that EA are offering people a way to get their DLC a third cheaper, but I think it would be a mistake to look at this and go “Wow, see how generous EA are?” when the standard price points for DLC are rather poor to begin with. None the less, it was still better than seeing one of the Bioware doctors take to the stage to more or less say “Please play more of our Star Wars MMO”. Bioware are a great company but God knows what happens to The Old Republic from here.

EA spent some considerable amount of time with the new Medal of Honor, and while I’ve seen some people say they’re expecting great things from it, I thought the demo was unrelentingly bland. It looked like “Generic brown-grey modern military shooter”, especially after Battlefield 3 and Black Ops II, and this is a kind of game we already have more than enough of. The idea of having the different countries battle against each other is kind of cool, but there just wasn’t enough original about it. The modern military FPS has already been done very well, to top that you either need to do it to an inconceivable standard of quality, or do something new with it. Warfighter showed no evidence it was doing either.

With FIFA 13 and UFC, again, sports games, it’s a cliché of the nerdy gamer but you know how I feel on this one. I did think it was rather funny though, how we were told FIFA 13 was going to be mind-blowingly innovative and then were shown new ways players stumble, slightly different dribbling, and not much else. Fortunately, Need for Speed: Most Wanted stepped in as another very pleasant surprise. I loved what Criterion did with Burnout Paradise and to see more of that combination of high speed driving with a fairly low-angle camera, a big open city, and spectacular wreckings of other vehicles and the environment, was great. The whole thing closed up with Crysis 3 which didn’t blow me away but looked like a fine game.

Overall, I thought EA did a surprisingly good job. That is admittedly, due to some pretty low standards on my part, but when I thought it would largely be repeat showings of content from other conferences, motion control games, social games nobody cared about, Origin, and other nonsense, they instead managed to really make it about the games and showed some great new stuff. EA get themselves into a lot of unsavoury business with the way they treat their consumers, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that they’re not all doom and gloom, and do bring us some genuinely wonderful titles.

So we’re less than a day away from E3, and while every year I know there are people who feel a little jaded about the whole experience, I can’t help but be excited. At the best we’ll get some great game demos and announcements from the show, and at the worst we’ll still have an event that acts as a platform for some of Giant Bomb’s best podcasts of the year. That being said there are a few things you should keep in mind if you’re following the conference and using the site.

Using the Site

It’s pinned to the top of the boards, but please, if you’re going to use the forums during E3 take a look at the mod team’s “E3 2012 and You” topic. Knowing how these things go I’m sure we’ll still get plenty of duplicate threads posted in the forums, things posted in the wrong places, and maybe even a message or two from people about why us locking their E3 blog posts is a great injustice, but all we can do is put the message out there. If you see anyone posting things in the wrong place or creating duplicate threads, don’t hesitate to contact the mod team. If you want to see Giant Bomb's general plan for coverage of the event then I also suggest you check you Jeff's article "And This Is E3", and generally keep an eye on the site and the Twitter feeds of the staff.

What Won't Be There

On the topic of the press conferences specifically, please remember the following points if you want to avoid disappointment:

• Valve are attending the event but will not be announcing anything new there. (source)
• Microsoft will not be announcing any new Xbox hardware this year. (source)
• Sony will not be announcing a PS4 this year. (source)

That doesn't mean we can't see some really awesome stuff, but remember not to spend the press conferences waiting for the console manufacturers to unveil a shiny new box or Gabe Newell to stride out on stage with Half-Life 3 in his hands.

When Things Will Happen

If you need to know when exactly everything is going down and you're on the east coast or west coast of the U.S., or in the UK like me, please follow the handy guide below, although be aware that the press conferences may not start bang on time.

Where To Watch Things

Nintendo and EA will be live-streaming press conferences from their sites, Ubisoft will be streaming theirs from their YouTube channel, Microsoft will be streaming theirs over Xbox LIVE, and Sony will be streaming from multiple places online and on Playstation Home. However, Gamespot, Gametrailers, and G4TV will be streaming all the press conferences, as well as plenty of other coverage of the event, so I recommend them. I also recommend that wherever you pick to watch the event, have at least one backup stream in mind in case that one gets a little choppy, this is a live event with a lot of viewers and will be prone to technical issues.

All Aboard The Hype Train

I guess all that remains now is to say I hope we all enjoy the show, and good or bad I look forward to some memorable moments in the days ahead.

-Gamer_152

So if you’ve been perusing the forums over the past few days you no doubt know about Ryan’s recent blog post apologising for his use of homophobic language, and you may also be familiar with the slew of homophobic and racist slurs that have hit that comments section, as well as the discussion about whether such language is appropriate to use in general. In case you’re still wondering, it is not okay to use homophobic or racial slurs on this site in any capacity. It’s something we in the moderation team are being blunt about, but this is a message that we’ve tried to get across through the rules documentation, on the forums, and on Twitter, yet people still seem to be unaware of it.

I was somewhat in two minds about making this post because I didn’t want to start more hostile arguments like the ones we’ve seen on Ryan’s blog post, but I thought it was important that I made some kind of statement on this for two reasons: 1. I think it’s better for us to talk things through rather than there being an uncomfortable undercurrent of mistrust and misunderstanding over the issue, and 2. The moderation team obviously needs to do everything we can to get the message out about what is and is not okay on the forums.

What I’m Talking About

The really disheartening thing for me is I could understand that some people haven’t read the rules or have severely misinterpreted them, and thought that such language was okay on the site. That wouldn’t mean I thought it was okay or they wouldn’t be moderated, but I could at least understand it. I could also understand to a small degree how people also thought Ryan’s accidental use of a homophobic slur on the live stream made it okay for everyone to use it. What I find it much, much harder to understand is that even after Ryan said that such terms were hurtful and indefensible, and that they had no place on this site, that people still felt it was okay to post them.

The following are purely my thoughts and don’t reflect those of the Giant Bomb staff or moderation team, and I understand if you disagree with what I have to say, but please, if you do respond keep it calm and civil. I hate to have to say this but I think it’s been proven necessary by this point: I will delete your posts, I will send you warnings, I will suspend you, and I will lock down this thread, if it proves I have too. We cool? Okay.

Why It’s Not Alright

The gaming community, or at least a certain portion of it, has long had an image of being exclusionary of certain groups, and being a rather sequestered and non-diverse group of people. To some degree I don’t think this reputation has been deserved, but it can’t be argued that social spaces like Xbox LIVE have become infamous for being awash with blatant sexism, racism, and homophobia, and that there are sizeable portions of the internet where the wild west anything-goes attitude has led to potentially offensive epithets getting thrown around like confetti. It seems almost every time this issue is brought up though, there’s a rather uncomfortable lack of understanding from the gaming community about why exactly this kind of behaviour is so wrong, and I think we all need to be a little more aware of the people around us. It’s the year 2012 and this kind of behaviour has to stop.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that it’s hypocritical of Giant Bomb to censor discriminatory language for being offensive, while openly allowing and using just about every other swear word under the sun, but do you really believe that saying “fuck” and using homophobic or racist slurs are the same thing? As Ryan said the words carry a lot of emotional baggage. You have to remember that when people have experienced their race or sexual orientation being attacked, these are the words they might well have come to associate that with. Heck, there are some people who’ve been bullied as children or throughout their lives with these words, it’s only natural that for them that they’ve come to carry the weight they have.

I’ve seen people on the forums saying that “They're just words” and “Context is important”, and while I agree with the latter to some degree, it’s obvious that for many people these aren't just words, and that regardless of context they do cause hurt and they do cause offense. If you believe they don't then I think you need to take a look around. How would you feel about using a homophobic slur towards or in the presence of a gay person? How would you feel about using a racial slur towards or in the presence of a person of that race? Just in the comments on Ryan’s post I saw people taking offense to such slurs, but even the act of taking offence some people seem to be attacking.

Taking Offence

Taking offence to something is an emotional reaction, it’s involuntary. We can train ourselves to try and develop less extreme reactions to certain stimuli, but you do not get to say “Because your involuntary reaction to this thing is different than my involuntary reaction, you’re dumb/silly/wrong/immature”. Really, at the point you’re telling people that their emotional response to something is incorrect, you start getting into “thought crime” territory. We’re not even talking about people demanding to be treated differently (which I think they’d be perfectly within their rights to do), we’re just talking about the basic, largely uncontrollable human reaction of people to what they find offensive, and already users are speaking out about this being “incorrect”.

To those of you saying that people would have an easier time in life if they weren’t offended by this stuff, I agree with you, but again, this is not something people are entirely in control of, and that still doesn’t give you the right to use offensive language however and wherever you want. By the same logic anyone would be allowed to come up to you in the street and call you a worthless piece of shit that no one will ever love because, hey, you’d have a much better time if you weren’t offended by that, right? And no, “I’m a person of the race/sexual orientation this word targets” or “I have friends of the race/sexual orientation this word targets” are not excuses. Who you or your friends are has no bearing on the effect these words have on people, and you as an individual member of this social group, or a friend of a member of this social group, do not get to dictate what is and isn’t hurtful, it doesn’t work that way.

Stopping This Behaviour

Often in these situations, those looking to prevent offence are accused of “just trying to be PC”, but censoring the use of these words doesn’t have to be about political correctness, sometimes it’s just about fostering an environment where people don’t have to risk feeling like crap to participate in discussion and where there aren’t unpleasant and needless tensions between people. You’re not robbed of your ability to talk about certain sexual orientations or races, or express your frustration, by these words being censored, but restricting the use of these words does lead to more welcoming and less hurtful communities.

I’ll be honest, yesterday was one of those rare occasions where I felt genuinely ashamed of a considerable portion of the community. Some of you left friendly and accepting messages towards Ryan and that was wonderful to see, but some of you behaved in a way that seemed to lack understanding, or in a way I’d associate with the less likeable denizens of Xbox LIVE. Eventually that discussion will die down, but this isn’t the first time we’ve had to moderate discriminatory language on the site, it won’t be the last, and it definitely won’t be the last time a large group of people in the gaming community show that they think it’s okay to use this kind of language. I believe Giant Bomb is better than what we’ve seen since the lantern run, and a lot of people have already shown that they don’t believe racist and homophobic language is okay, I only hope that we can all reach some kind of understanding on this issue.

Duder, It’s Over

As always, thank you for reading and if there’s any feedback you want to give me, positive or negative, whether you think I’m right or wrong, don’t be afraid of sticking it in the comments section below.

-Gamer_152

Addendum

I want to preface this by saying that I’m very happy that this blog post has received so much attention, even if the comments section does seem to have devolved into a somewhat unlikeable mess. I couldn’t begin to try and respond to everyone individually but to everyone who has given me positive feedback, thank you, and to those who are disagreeing with me, I’ve come up with some answers to the most common responses I’m seeing here.

Posts That Contain Homophobic Slurs

“But What About Context?/This is Just Political Correctness/They’re Just Words/Words Only Have Power If You Give Them Power”

“This Whole Ryan Situation Has Been Blown Way Out of Proportion”

“If You Ban A Few Words Then You Have To Ban All The Words!”

Addendum 2

I regret to inform you that I’m locking this blog post. The comments have largely died down now, but this was meant to be a place of civil discussion, and yet throughout the lifetime of the comments section people have openly violated rules I’ve clearly stated in this post, and acted in a hostile manner to each other. I’m not going to risk this kind of behaviour continuing. If you have any questions or comments that are civil and don't violate the rules though, please feel free to talk to me in private.

As a bit of a side note, I understand that some of you took offence to the last point in my first addendum to this post (which I've since removed), and I can only apologise for any offence caused, but I stand by what I said. I don’t believe that the c-word is the exact same thing as racial and homophobic slurs. However, I do think it’s important to note that at no point did I say the term couldn’t be offensive, or even state that in general it was any less offensive than racial or homophobic slurs. I just stated that I don’t believe they are direct equivalents, don’t believe that they get the exact same use in modern society, and that in general Giant Bomb hadn’t expressed a big problem with the c-word, while at least a small number of users had with racial and homophobic slurs.

I understand the term is offensive to some, I’ve never advocated using it to insult people, those who do use it to insult other users will be moderated, and should the message ever come down from the staff that they don’t want it on the site any longer, I’ll be happy to help make sure it’s use in the community is completely discontinued. One thing I do find myself rather baffled over though, is the fact that many people making the argument that the c-word or racial and homophobic slurs were highly offensive or shouldn’t be used, openly used them themselves. When you’re spreading the use of the exact words you’re fighting against, that seems a little self-defeating.

Sadly, while I’m sure many of you were genuinely concerned about the use of the c-word, I at least felt as though some were trying to say it should be banned just for the sake of arguing against the mod team on an issue they didn’t like. At least for the moment, I’ve become somewhat soured on the Giant Bomb community as a whole, and this discussion has made me not want to talk controversial rules through with the community in the future. Normal moderator policy would have been to lay down the rules, say they’re not up for debate, and leave.

While the rules still weren’t up for debate, I wanted to genuinely explain why I believe these rules are important, why I believe they’re a good thing, and try to address at least some of those who disagreed. This was met with users not reading the post, commenting, and then seeming to walk out while giving themselves a green flag to use homophobic and racist language, users putting words in my mouth, users treating me or other people like idiots for having a different opinion, users being outright hostile or insulting to each other, users throwing around racist and homophobic slurs as much as they liked, and in some cases users displaying a scary amount of ignorance.

There were people who spread this topic, agreed with me, and sympathised with me, and to those people I am very, very grateful. There were also users who disagreed with me but managed to do so in a respectful way and I appreciate their input too. I don’t regret making this post and some people have made me feel fantastic about it, so thank you to them. But I walk away from this with the rather uneasy knowledge that a sizeable portion of Giant Bomb won’t be using discriminatory language because we tell them not to, they just won’t be using it because there’s a hard rule in place saying they can’t, and for a lot of people that’s not even stopping them.

People have said “Giant Bomb is just as bad as every other online community” and I still don’t believe that, nor does the thought that everywhere else is really messed up make me feel any better, but I didn’t quite realise we had this kind of deep-rooted problem to the extent that we seem to. All that remains now is to start moderating the users who have violated the rules here, and hope people can remember to not use these kinds of terms in the coming days. Until next time guys, I’ll see you on the boards and hope we never have to run into this kind of situation again.

-Gamer_152

Warning: The following post makes references to the nature of Mass Effect 3's endings, but does not go into any specifics. The comments on the other hand are basically free reign for spoilers.

So the blogs have been posted, many discussions have been had, and while a few people out there are still expressing their opinions for the first time, the dust is now mostly settled on the issue of the Mass Effect 3 ending. I don’t think I need to bother going into why many people don’t like the ending, it’s something that’s been done to death and the reasons for the backlash seem pretty universal; it’s a deus ex machina, it lacks closure, it doesn’t reflect our choices throughout the games, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s not consistent with what Mass Effect is. At this point I think what’s more interesting than reflecting on the ending, is reflecting on the fan reaction itself.

The Good Reactions

Perhaps the most surprising thing for me has not been that Mass Effect 3 had such a poor ending, but that many of the fan reactions have been very reasonable and expressed in a civil tone. The voice of the Bioware fanbase in recent times had been a cacophonous and unpleasant one, expressing over-reactionary statements about Bioware being some sort of corrupted evil corporation, attacking writer Jennifer Hepler in ridiculous ways, deciding before release and with very little evidence that Mass Effect 3 was a bad game, criticising Bioware simply for including homosexual love interests, and strongly criticising Bioware/EA for their use of day one DLC, with often minimal knowledge as to the arguments for day one DLC or of how development cycles work. The temptation was to say that the Bioware fanbase was a very dislikeable one, but I was never entirely convinced this was the situation. It’s likely that among us there were just a fair number of people more loud and unreasonable than the rest, as there often are in many groups.

Now don't get me wrong, when it came to the Mass Effect 3 ending I saw way too many people who over-reacted, thought Bioware had done something legitimately wrong by making them a game they didn't like, failed to acknowledge that Bioware had done any good, or believed that their opinion on the Mass Effect 3 ending entitled them to free content. Despite this, after all the baseless pissing and moaning that had come forth from the Bioware fan hivemind before, I was pleasantly surprised to see calm and intellectual breakdowns of the ending, people campaigning by donating money to Child’s Play, people sending cupcakes to Bioware, and the like. Even the “Retake Mass Effect 3” petition, while rather unfortunately named, was doing nothing more than respectfully asking for Bioware’s consideration of the kind of changes they wanted, and stated that “It is the right of the writers and developers of the Mass Effect series to end that series however they see fit”.

This showed that gamers disagreeing with creative works didn’t have to result in a torrent of vitriolic and over-reactionary complaints, the best of the Bioware fans managed to take something bad and make something good out of it. In fact I'm saddened to see that many on the outside of this situation got the wrong end of the stick, assuming that from the petition and the way Bioware fans have acted in the past, that everyone expressing major grievances about the ending was being unfair and unreasonably demanding, when that was not the case.

Forum Flooding

Unfortunately, even among the more reasonable of us I don’t think our actions were necessarily as smart or beneficial to us as they could have been. Firstly, a lot of the blogs and forum posts out there criticising the ending, seemed to be written soon after or almost immediately after people had played the ending. I do think there’s something to be said for getting down those ideas in text fresh off the brain, but I think on the whole Mass Effect 3’s ending is one you really need time to process, otherwise you risk making quick knee-jerky reactions which you may later disagree with. Posting so quickly on the issue, a lot of people also didn’t have the time to read the common statements about the game which had already been brought up multiple times, leading to a whole lot of forum posts which were very similar.

Another major problem was that many video game sites had forums which became over-run with an enormous quantity of new threads on the issue, as opposed to posts being concentrated in a smaller number of established threads. Everyone had their own thoughts on the topic, everyone felt passionately about it, and everyone wanted to be heard. This ended up making it so that if you wanted to go somewhere to talk about video games, it was repeatedly and strongly slammed in your face that people didn’t like the Mass Effect 3 ending. On one gaming forum I frequent, it became almost impossible for weeks to use the general discussion boards for anything more than discussing the Mass Effect 3 ending.

What’s more, because the discussion was scattered, people would end up going into new threads to make points that had been many times over in old threads, bumping them and increasing their post count. Here on Giant Bomb the moderation team eventually made the decision to start locking down new threads being created on the ending of the game, which I know wasn’t a popular decision with some, but I believe it was the right one considering the situation.

What We May Be Overlooking

Lastly, from what I've seen, even a lot of the more reasonable among us came to focus too much on the endings as part of the whole picture. Now believe me, I don’t like that ending either and I totally sympathise with a lot of the complaints made about the game, but the ratio of ending talk to talk about the rest of the game still seemed at least a little off. We ended up criticising Bioware for the bad, but never quite praising them enough for the good. Even the more rational of us, me included, have come to take Mass Effect a little bit for granted. When asked most people seem to tell you that yeah, despite the problems with the ending, Mass Effect 3 was overall a good game, but I still think we can benefit from stopping and really examining what Mass Effect 3 is doing right that no other game is doing.

Having such a rich and well-designed universe with such engaging characters is worthy of some great commendation, but Mass Effect goes way beyond even that. The fact it gives you genuinely difficult political and social decisions, that everyone’s game can include a different cast of characters, that everyone’s games can have huge differences in the canon, and that your choices carry between the whole trilogy, these are mind-blowing things when you stop and think about them, but we’ve come to accept them as “just part of Mass Effect” to a greater extent than we should, and are noticing a little too much of the negative in relation to the positive. I think we should all remember one very important thing; that the reason the ending matters to us as much as it does in the first place, is because Bioware have been able to create a series which was so easy to become deeply invested in.

Duder, It's Over

What’s done is done though, and like I say, I'm of the opinion that a lot of people have handled this thing intelligently, I only hope that in the future we can see less of the kinds of people who over-react, whine, and demand lots of free stuff every time a multi-million pound games developer doesn’t do the exact thing that they want them to do. Going ahead I think we have a lot to look forward to and even if they can’t fix everything, I’m extremely excited to see what the epilogue DLC has in store for us. Thank you for reading.

-Gamer_152

When it comes to the list of things that game publishers and developers get attacked for, day one DLC, early DLC, and on-disc DLC seem to be right up the top, often garnering the hate of game enthusiasts the internet over. I’m not usually one to side with the controversial moves huge corporations often make; I think online passes are a bad idea, I’m often disappointed with wilful unoriginality, I hate it when companies price things exploitatively, I’m against bad EULAs, and I think invasive DRM is bullshit. But in the case of day one DLC I think consumers have got things wrong, and that this kind of business move, while it can certainly be abused in some pretty serious ways, doesn’t by default deserve to be lumped in with some of the more insidious practises the industry has developed.

From what I’ve seen the essential problem that people have with day one DLC is that they feel like they’re by default being conned out of content they’re owed, regardless of how much content is in the main game or how much they’ve paid for it. The general impression gamers seem to have is that DLC available at launch is either always content that is ripped out of the main game and sold separately, that it’s something that is made by man hours which would have originally been spent on the main game being diverted, or that the company is in some other way swindling us over. I don’t believe this is a fair and accurate assessment of day one DLC as a concept, and I believe the points people often raise against day one DLC are rooted in misunderstandings or a misplaced sense of entitlement.

The Dev Cycle

In games development it’s not simply the case that all employees of a studio work on a game, that game releases, and then they can move onto other projects. With on-disc games there is a significant amount of time between the development on a game being finished and that game seeing release, where the game must go through approval, the physical boxes, discs and manuals must be manufactured, and the game must be distributed to retailers. This leaves a lot of time during which developers are potentially sitting around and doing nothing. Even during development of the game it’s not as if every person on the team is constantly working at all times. Obviously, after the initial bulk of design work that goes on nearer the start of the project, a designer has significantly less work to do, and a full team of artists isn’t a great deal of use during the big-fixing stage. I think you can see where this is going.

Often, there’s a considerable amount of spare man hours just laying around for a development studio to make use of, especially towards the end of projects. With digital marketplaces allowing for game content that’s fairly small, and can easily be developed relatively quickly, it only makes sense that developers who are able to, would use that spare time for creating early DLC. Remember, developers who aren’t working on something are essentially going to waste and may even be laid off. This method of creating day one DLC ensures that the developers stay in work, the companies and businessmen still make money, and we can get more content from the games we enjoy sooner. It’s potentially a win all round, and yet many consumers criticise developers and publishers over any kind of day one DLC, knowingly or not calling for a system where developers do their work on a game, then sit around twiddling their thumbs for weeks or months on end before working on DLC. It doesn’t make sense.

Honestly though, even if developers and publishers are not making DLC just by using the spare man hours of the employees working on the main game, I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. Imagine we had two identical retail games which were created using the same amount of resources, employees, and time, but for one of these games the development studio had brought on board more resources and staff to work on the DLC while the main game was being developed, and planned to release both at the same time. For both games the consumer would be paying the same amount of money and get the same level of content and quality from the main game, but the game with day one DLC would be attacked by certain consumers for ripping off customers, even though we can obviously see that wouldn’t be the case.

On-Disc Woes

In addition to downloadable day one DLC there seems to be a particular disdain for on-disc DLC. Essentially, I make all the same arguments for that kind of content that I would for any other launch DLC, but people seem to regularly express the view that purchasing on-disc DLC means paying for something you’ve already bought, in a way downloadable launch DLC doesn’t. However, it can be seen that this is not the case from the fact that many of the people who complain about on-disc DLC know about the on-disc DLC in a game when they buy it. They will enter into a deal where they pay money for a product in which they know some of the on-disc content is restricted, and then complain that they’ve been ripped off, despite the product functioning exactly as they believed it did when they willingly exchanged money for it.

I believe a large part of the controversy over on-disc DLC specifically has come about because people feel that if something is physically in their possession then they should have access to it, because we have traditionally been used to buying products and having access to everything in our possession, instead of also taking into account licensing issues and content restrictions that have come with the digital age. However, I have yet to hear a good argument why such content restrictions alone mean we’re getting conned. In terms of how it functions and what you’re paying for on-disc DLC is identical to any downloadable day one DLC, except that customers can get their content without lengthy download times and those with little hard-drive space don’t have to have it consumed by downloaded data.

The True Problem

Ultimately I think the controversy over day one DLC begins to touch on a very important issue in the industry, but I think it has its sights a little off. We shouldn’t be whining over whether games have early DLC or not, but what we should be looking at is whether game content, whatever form it comes in, is giving us value for money. I’ve seen no good argument for why we should be owed any more than what we’ve paid for, and there’s no reason we should be given anything simply because it was made before the release of the main game, that’s the exact kind of thing people are talking about when they use the phrase “gamer entitlement”. If a company has given you a product of appropriate quality and length for the money you paid, you can’t say fairer than that. My issue is that a lot of companies aren’t doing this, and this is what we should be voicing our complaints over, instead of attacking the red herring of the concept of day one DLC.

At least here in the UK I think the default £40 price tag just seems like too much for the average game, and many out in the U.S. have argued that $60 is too much as well. What’s more we have seen a lot of badly priced DLC, from single-player experiences that end all too soon for what we’ve paid, to handfuls of maps for popular games being sold at extortionate prices. I doubt they’re going away any time soon, but in a world where we don’t all have limitless bundles of cash to spend on video games, and the industry is quickly trying to eradicate the used game market and take more control over their sales it’s sad to see. Don’t hate day one DLC, hate not getting your money’s worth.

-Gamer_152

On Wednesday 15 February Ubisoft announced Assassin’s Creed III, which will be the forth Assassin’s Creed game released for home consoles in four years, or the ninth game in four years if you want to count everything they’ve put out in-browser and on handheld devices. The Assassin’s Creed brand name is still going strong, with a reported seven million copies of Revelations being shipped, but I’ve had the feeling for a while that Assassin’s Creed seems poorly suited to the yearly blockbuster model which they seem to be locking themselves into.

What the Competition Does Differently

Perhaps this sounds like the obvious, but I think it’s worth stating; franchises from which games are released on a regular basis need to present players with the kind of games that lend themselves well to replayability. Modern action games largely do this by placing a focus on multiplayer. In single player there are a lot of specifics; it’s more scripted and fixed, so when you play through it enough times it feels like you’ve seen it all before, but when you play a multiplayer game the involvement of multiple real human beings and the focus on their actions means that an almost infinite number of different scenarios can be created, and a greater sense of variety is present in the gameplay.

The franchises which are famous for producing popular sequels are series like Halo, Call of Duty, and Battlefield; games which rely heavily on their multiplayer to provide the experience they do. Assassin’s Creed on the other hand has been a series for which the main draw has been the single-player and they’ve parcelled it out in no small portions. You’ll notice that games like Halo and Battlefield have a single-player mode of about moderate length, and the Call of Duty series likes to keep its single-player very brief. This can allow for a considerable amount of development time and resources to go into developing multiplayer, or for more Hollywood-style polish to be put on the single-player, and also makes sure that players aren’t all burned out on the single-player the next time a new game in that series rolls around.

Single-Player Syndrome

For Assassin’s Creed, since its second instalment, it’s been about adding more and more to the single-player, and I think that’s been a real strength of the series. I sunk countless hours into Brotherhood, running around the world, picking up flags, buying up stores, destroying all of Leonardo’s machines and more, but when I sit back after a job well done and Ubisoft tells me “Nice work, now you’ll do that again next year, and the year after that, and the year after that”, it doesn’t sound like an enticing prospect. Of course you could assume that even if people get sick of the single-player there’s still the multiplayer to enjoy, but that doesn’t seem to have been accepted as the winning point of the series.

I don’t think it’s any mistake that multiplayer was introduced to Assassin’s Creed when it was; I’m sure that Ubisoft saw the relationship between franchises with wildly successful multiplayer, and those same franchises being able to bring out game after game in a relatively short space of time. The original and innovative multiplayer mode they introduced in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood was wild and ballsy, but I believe they thought the reward for getting it right would be well worth the effort. Big name companies don’t do something this risky without some very serious potential pay-off. My worry though, is that the multiplayer in Assassin’s Creed has fundamental traits which mean it can’t be popular for an audience on the scale of a lot of other sequelised action games.

The Holes in the Multiplayer

The Assassin’s Creed multiplayer is largely built around patience and subtlety, and people aren’t patient or subtle. I don’t think the kind of people who buy up a new CoD every six months want a sly and subdued approach to player combat, they want to follow their instincts, face players head-on and constantly be seeing action on-screen. Things also aren’t helped by the fact that the Assassin’s Creed multiplayer does have somewhat of a learning curve. While the majority of the most popular games out there can take very long amounts of time to master, and undoubtedly reward more skilled players over less skilled ones, most of them still provide a kind of gameplay where the basics are immediately obvious to the player. Assassin’s Creed doesn’t have that; even quickly working out what character portraits correspond to what character models requires a little getting used to.

As bad as this may sound so far, even these facts seem a bit irrelevant until Ubisoft can get the multiplayer to appeal to the more “core” market. As it is the Assassin’s Creed multiplayer is host to a whole lot of flaws, just like you’d expect any new, innovative game to be. Revelations certainly improved on some of what Brotherhood presented, but there are still plenty of situations where you seem to get killed out of nowhere, plenty of times abilities seem to enable people to escape or kill you in ways that seem unfair, plenty of times you’re assigned targets only for them to be immediately killed, plenty of times you’ll go long stretches without being assigned a target, plenty of times the distribution of pursuers on you seems imbalanced, plenty of times where early success seems like a matter of how skilled or unskilled the target you’re assigned just happens to be, and perhaps worst of all plenty of times your target is running around on a rooftop and going after them would mean making yourself a huge target. In Assassin’s Creed, people playing with the action-oriented style they’d expect from other games, and would instinctively use, actually has the power to break the multiplayer.

Ubisoft and Their Audience

The theory that this would put people off may seem like baseless conjecture, but from my experience online, Assassin’s Creed certainly isn’t the most popular kid on the block. While other sequel-heavy franchises will have players still flocking to the multiplayer in large numbers right up to and even after the release of the next game in the series, for months before Revelations was released the Brotherhood multiplayer seemed like a baron wasteland. I live in the UK and use a connection which has an open NAT and a good upload and download speed, but I found unless I connected at a rather specific time I just couldn’t get enough players together for a match, and even when I could I saw the same names popping up over and over.

Right now there are certainly people playing the Revelations multiplayer, but from what I can tell there’s nowhere near the number you’d expect to see for an annually released game, and it’s only a few months after launch. There’s definitely not the kind of major online buzz for the Assassin’s Creed multiplayer that there is for other big multiplayer titles. It seems like a large part of the game, perhaps the very part of it that Ubisoft could be relying on to continue Assassin’s Creed as their huge yearly blockbuster series, is of a lower quality than franchises it’s competing against which release far less regularly, and that’s worrying.

Assassin’s Creed Going Forwards

Don’t mistake me, I don’t think it’s that surprising that Ubisoft are trying to make a series as successful as Assassin’s Creed into a regular thing, and this certainly isn’t a blog proclaiming that the upcoming Assassin’s Creed won’t be highly profitable. Assassin’s Creed III will have more marketing money pumped into it than any game Ubisoft has produced before, and you don’t go from seven million sales to a complete bust just like that. What I am saying though is that I wonder how long the approach they currently have to the series will be sustainable, and I certainly worry for the quality of the series as it goes ahead. Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong and the new Assassin’s Creed sequels will be an uproarious critical and financial success, and great fun to play, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t watching the franchise with an air of doubt right now.

Of course, if the Assassin’s Creed series is very profitable over its next few iterations, that will mean something important. Unless there are major changes made to the series’ formula in the near future, it will mean that a company has been able to create a successful annual franchise out of a game that doesn’t have a popular multiplayer component. It will also mean that they’ve been able to create a successful annual franchise out of an action-adventure game with a huge, expansive single-player component, and these are things we’re just not seeing on the market at the moment. Of course, how much the driving force behind the series is marketing and reputation, and how much of it is to do with the actual content of the games could well be a debate in itself. Thank you for reading.

-Gamer_152

Perhaps this seems like a bit of a trivial subject, but the way I see it, this is by far the largest and most notable video hosting service there is, putting themselves out on one of the major pieces of video game hardware currently on the market, and yet this app is rather terrible. Now I’m happy that I can watch YouTube videos on my Xbox, and in some ways I’m genuinely appreciative of what Microsoft and YouTube have been able to do here, but this application is at least a small part of what people are paying for when they pay for Xbox LIVE Gold, and that begins to raise questions about whether this is up to scratch for a paid product. You’d also think it’d be beneficial for both parties in this situation to have an application that’s functional for end users, instead of encouraging users to give up and go back to their PCs to watch YouTube videos. So, in a perfect world here are the changes the developers would make to the YouTube app.

Better Input Functionality

The Qwerty keyboard was created in the late 1800s, so you’d think that by now everyone would just kind of have the idea in their head that it was good practise to use it, or at least some variation on it, for text input. For unknown reasons the YouTube app, like other programs on the Xbox, uses a system where you have to scroll from left to right and “a” is at one end of the keypad, while “z” is at the other. Inputting text using any kind of controller is already a rather clunky experience, it doesn’t need an extra layer of clunk on top of it. What’s more the text input controls don’t have a button for space, instead they assign the Y button to close the video search, something that seems to have zero benefit for the functionality of the app. At least somewhat efficient text input has been standard on the Xbox 360 for years and should be part of the interface here. You can use the bumpers to skip along the keyboard, but the app never tells you this, and the bumpers still feel better suited for moving your cursor along the text field, something you don’t seem to be able to do in the YouTube app.

Perhaps it’s one of the bigger asks that could be made, but it would also be nice to see voice support for searching. Again, fumbling through with the D-Pad kind of sucks and using voice support in their console software is the exact kind of thing people paid £130 for when they bought their Kinect.

List the Videos Better

I’m no UI designer but it seems to be that one of the core ideas behind websites like YouTube is that when the user visits the site, they can see the latest content their signed up for immediately laid out in front of them. When the YouTube site gets this largely right, it’s kind of confusing that the YouTube app manages to get this so wrong. When visiting someone’s channel you’re shown a list of the playlists they’ve made, and have to click through to a playlist entitled “All Uploads” to see their videos in chronological order. When I visit someone’s channel I’m very rarely looking for a playlist, I want to see their new videos instantly, and yet that’s a minor issue compared to the real problem with how the app lists its videos.

When clicking on a video category or looking at your subscriptions, the app seems content to just display all of the channels within those lists, as opposed to the latest videos from those channels. This means that when checking your subscriptions, unless you’re good at memorising video thumbnails to see when they’ve changed, you’d have to click through to every one of the channels to see whether they have new videos for you. For YouTube themselves it seems a particularly bad idea for them to do this with video categories, given the fact that the people under these categories are YouTube partners and not showcasing their content properly essentially means lost money for YouTube.

When loading one of your playlists you’re also only able to view the first 100 videos in it, and when you load someone else’s playlist, the first 50. There are a lot of channels (like the Giant Bomb channel) which have a whole ton of videos, and essentially cutting out huge chunks of YouTube from the app doesn’t really make sense. People want that content and I see no disadvantage in Microsoft and YouTube giving it to them.

Make Sure the App Works

I don’t know if anyone else has had a similar experience, but in my time of using the app I’ve had five crashes, at least one lock-up, and a day where it could not retrieve any of my channel subscriptions. This is not cool. The app also frequently fails to load videos, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s on my end. However, that doesn’t excuse the fact that when things do go wrong the application doesn’t have an appropriate way to treat the situation.

As it is, if a list of videos fails to load you’re just left staring at the application background and the YouTube logo, or if you’re lucky the never-ending loading animation. There’s no message telling you the videos didn’t load, in fact the controls disappear entirely from the screen too. Someone who wasn’t rather familiar with computers probably wouldn’t have any idea what was going on. Clicking on a playlist before the app has finished loading in the playlist seems a pretty sure way to cause this particular error and that’s something that people are going to do a lot, you can’t have that just break the app. On some rare occasions I’ve found the program is actually loading videos, but not displaying the loading icon for some reason. This is bad.

If you’re watching a video and your connection has a hiccup you’re little better off. If the video is loading mid-play there’s actually no way to pause it, you have to wait until it’s loaded in and then hit pause, and again, if it can’t load in the video, it won’t tell you, it will just sit there with the loading icon running. People pausing videos and waiting for them to load is something they do fairly often, the program should be able to support that properly. As a side note, if the “loading” or “not loaded” image could not be a dull grey background with an ellipsis over it that’d be nice too. Oh, and when you play a video, then play one of its related videos, there’s really no reason for the app to start playing the first video again when the related video is finished.

I was going to add that the app should support liking or disliking videos in it as well, but that feature actually seems to be in there. The problem is sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn’t, and I can’t quite work out why it appears on certain occasions and not on others. At any rate it would also be good to have the facility to favourite videos or add them to playlists when you’re watching them.

Duder, It’s Over

YouTube and Microsoft had the opportunity here to bring us an app which was a huge step forward in getting internet-based entertainment into our living rooms, but instead they’ve created what feels like a restricted and watered down version of what is actually a great website. I doubt we’ll see any major overhaul to the app at this point, but if we did I’d have some serious respect for the guys behind it.

-Gamer_152

I didn’t want to post this directly to the forums because I think the boards have enough Mass Effect 3 discussion as it is, but I wanted to say something about this situation in particular that wasn’t just another post in a thread somewhere. For some time now the internet has been positively crawling with speculation over the idea that Mass Effect 3 will be a bad game.

If you’ve not heard it by now the theory goes that because Mass Effect 2 was simplified in terms of gameplay, Dragon Age II (and possibly Mass Effect 2) was considered to be a drop in quality from its predecessor, and because of the involvement of EA who increasingly seem to care less and less about not screwing the customer over, that Mass Effect 3 has the possibility of being a very disappointing title. Some have even gone a few steps further to proclaim that Mass Effect 3 will be a bad game and have already started raining down their hate on EA and Bioware for the hypothetically terrible game that will apparently be released.

Guys, this has gotten out of hand. My aim isn’t to offend anyone here, but Mass Effect 3 isn’t even out yet and the idea that’s it’s guaranteed to be a complete flop doesn’t seem that sensible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the last person who wants to see the Mass Effect franchise take a turn for the worse, and I do think there may be something to the theories that it’s going to be a game that’s lacking in comparison to its predecessors, but the degree of certainty to which some people believe Mass Effect is going to be a poor game seems a little premature, so let’s step back and break down the speculation over this whole business.

Dragon Age II

Dragon Age II seems to be a popular piece of evidence brought forth for why there is or will be a decline in the quality of Bioware products. Firstly, I think some people seem to be a little hysterical when it comes to judging the quality of Dragon Age II itself. I’m sure there are a bunch of people out there who think Dragon Age II is a bad game and have perfectly valid reasons for thinking so, but I do wonder if for some Dragon Age II’s crime was not so much being a bad game, but rather being a game that wasn’t as good as its predecessor.

If you look at the reviews out there, at least among professional writers, Dragon Age II was never regarded as a badly-made game; it averaged a pretty consistent 8/10 across the board. But okay, for the sake of argument let’s say that Dragon Age II was a bad or at least very disappointing title. Dragon Age II is still just one game, and to take that one product and treat it as being reflective of all future Bioware titles doesn’t seem fair. But okay, let’s say for the sake of argument Dragon Age II could certainly help us divine the future of Bioware titles.

The Dev Process and Mass Effect 2

The problem is, the theories behind why Dragon Age II was the way it was largely seem to revolve round the idea that it was interference from EA and a sell-out attitude on Bioware’s part that ruined the game. From what I can see we just don’t know enough about the development of the game to say that, but one rather obvious development problem that Bioware most likely faced is that the quality of Dragon Age II was hurt because it was rushed.

Between the U.S. releases of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II there were sixteen months, whereas between the announcement and release of the original Dragon Age there were roughly five years. Of course we have no solid numbers for development time here, but what we do have suggests a significantly longer development period for Dragon Age: Origins compared to Dragon Age II. Mass Effect doesn’t seem to have this problem, with the Mass Effect games probably not only needing less assets and design work, but with them also having a twenty-six month gap between the release of Mass Effect 2 and 3, the same amount of time that there was between 1 and 2. Of course I’m not saying that that this means there weren’t other factors that affected the quality of Dragon Age II, but I think this helps disprove the idea that the exact same problems that threatened Dragon Age II are certainly going to ruin Mass Effect 3.

Some of you may be thinking at this point that Dragon Age II wasn’t the only recent disappointment though, but that Mass Effect 2 was also indicative of a decline in quality from Bioware games. However, surely if you didn’t like Mass Effect 2 it should be a given that you’re unlikely to enjoy Mass Effect 3. The idea that if you didn’t like a video game, that you won’t like the sequel to that game, shouldn’t be a major revelation. I have seen some speculate that because 2 was simpler than 1, that this indicates 3 will be simpler than 2, but again, I just don’t think this is how it works. Just because one game in the series was simplified, doesn’t mean the next will be.

EA and Bioware

As for the theory that EA’s involvement in Mass Effect 3 will run it into the ground, perhaps, but this seems like rather baseless speculation. We really know very little about the internal relationship between EA and Bioware on this one and there are plenty of games EA could have ruined in the past and just haven’t. The closest thing we even have to proof that EA may have had their hands in Bioware’s work is the fact that we know Mass Effect 3 will have online multiplayer, almost certainly as a means to flog more online pass codes for EA. This, however, says nothing about the quality of the single-player or even multiplayer game.

We’ve already been told that the multiplayer content is largely separate and optional, just because they’ve developed this multiplayer content doesn’t mean they’ve cut down the development team working on the single-player game (this doesn’t seem like the title EA would choose to skimp out on resources for), and just look at Dead Space 2. That was a recent EA-published product with multiplayer that felt crow-barred in but that didn’t stop anyone from loving the hell out of the single-player. EA aren’t exactly my favourite publisher either, but they’re still showing that good games can be made under them.

The Chobot Reveal

Lastly, there’s been the recent reveal of one character being modelled on and voiced by Jessica Chobot which seems to have ruffled a lot of feathers, even from people who barely know who Chobot is. Now, to me the level of hate that’s come down on Chobot seems way over the top, but if seeing a video game journalist you don’t like appear in a game significantly puts you off the game as a whole then fine, that’s how you feel and you’ve got every right to feel however you want. But if your point is that including a pretty gamer chick with a low-cut top is pandering to nerds I see where you’re coming from, but there’s plenty of things that the Mass Effect franchise has done before now that could have been called “pandering”.

The obvious example is the female lead of the show Chuck becoming a main character in Mass Effect 2 and walking around throughout the game dressed in a skintight catsuit, but this goes back way further than that. Even very early on in the original Mass Effect, you were exploring a gentlemen’s club where provocatively dressed blue alien ladies could be seen lap dancing. I personally don’t have any problem with this, I’m just saying Jessica Chobot in a low-cut tank top doesn’t seem that wildly distant from what the series has presented before.

Duder, It’s Over

All in all I’m not saying Mass Effect 3 will be a good game or a bad game, and I think it’s wise to retain some scepticism, but I think people have gotten somewhat hysterical on this one. I think Mass Effect 3 still has plenty of opportunity to be a great game and that we’re far from a time where we can pass a final verdict on its quality. Thanks for reading.

-Gamer_152

I’m not going to lie, there’s still quite a lot of 2011 games that I haven’t played through, but from what I have got my hands on I can say 2011 was a great year for video games, and hopefully 2012 can prove itself as a fine year too. I know this may be a little way into the year to post this but come on, it was January, what have I missed? So, for those who have not already clicked away in horror at this self-centred display of video game enjoyment, here are my most anticipated titles of 2012.

Bioshock Infinite

A lot of people seemed to look down on Bioshock 2 in a way I didn’t. I suspect it was partly that I was just more into the gameplay and atmosphere, and partly because Bioshock 1 set the bar so high, but like most other people I think Bioshock Infinite looks to be a true return to form for the games, and from what has been shown Irrational seem to be displaying a remarkable ability to take the spirit of the original Bioshock and transplant in an ambitious new world, characters, and story. I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised to finish 2012 calling Bioshock Infinite my game of the year. I only hope it can live up to the expectations set by what they’ve shown us so far.

Borderlands 2

For me Borderlands was far from a perfect game. I found the shooting felt better in most other FPS games, the attempts at story seemed tacked-on and unpleasant, and the environments never really caught my eye. That being said, Gearbox still did an admirable job of building a genuinely fun loot-driven FPS/RPG. There was a weird sense of fulfilment watching the numbers fly out of enemy’s heads, especially when you got to try out various new kick-ass weapons you’d acquired recently or when you dropped down a turret and watched it lay waste to your foes. If Gearbox could make another Borderlands up to the standard of the first one, that’d be pretty good, but if Gearbox could build a better Borderlands which fixes the parts of the original game that didn’t work so well, that would be awesome.

Halo 4

We have next to no information on this game and yet somehow that doesn’t stop me from keeping a close eye on it. I’ve been a diehard fan of the Halo franchise, and after Bungie left the series with Halo: Reach I’ve been crossing my fingers tightly and praying that 343 Industries don’t mess this up. It doesn’t sound like Halo 4 will be a particularly original entry in the series, but they still have every opportunity to prove themselves as skilled developers on this one and deliver another excellent Halo game.

Luigi’s Mansion 2

I’ve heard it said that we all remember Luigi’s Mansion being better that it actually was and in a way that’s probably true, but that fact still doesn’t dampen my interest in Luigi’s Mansion 2. I can’t even guarantee that I’ll get a 3DS at this point but if I do this game will be a must-have for me. While series like Mario and Zelda still stand up well today, I find myself somewhat weary of Nintendo’s repeated rehashing of the same games, but Luigi’s Mansion not only presents something unique as far as Nintendo games go, but also as far as video games go as a whole. With Luigi’s Mansion 2 Nintendo have my sense of nostalgia tightly gripped in their hands and they’re not letting go.

Mass Effect 3

Some seem to already be proclaiming a considerable amount of worry over Mass Effect 3, anxious that elements like the co-op mission and the seemingly heavy involvement of EA are indicators of a potentially disappointing last instalment to the Mass Effect trilogy. I think this is a possibility, but let’s not lose our heads. Bioware have proven repeatedly their ability to develop high quality video games, and Mass Effect 3 could well be finale the series deserves. I really liked Mass Effect, I probably enjoyed Mass Effect 2 even more, and if Bioware can bring us a Mass Effect 3 that does justice to the compelling world and characters laid out in those games, I’ll be a very happy man.

Duder, It’s Over

Of course, these are just the games I’m most fixated on, I’m sure the year will bring us plenty more interesting titles, and I’ve found that some of the best games of previous years have been those which I’ve not been particularly expectant for, but have come out of the blue and been such a big hit with everyone else I had to get them. I hope you’re looking forward to everything the rest of this year has to offer, and feel free to share the games you’re most looking forward to in the comments. Thanks for reading.

-Gamer_152