Now that the dust has settled, of sorts, following the release of Modern Warfare 3 it's interesting to see how critical reaction and consumer has differed. The game has sold phenomenally, I'm fairly certain it's broken records again for number of sales in all media and it's understandable why, it has given its players more of what they want. Yet amongst critics and communities there is a feeling that the game hasn't progressed the series any further, that it is just that, more of the same, only shinier.
It's interesting because outside of sports games the concept of annually released gaming franchises is a fairly new thing, times gone by the development cycle for games was far longer, but since then despite a series releasing more frequently the expectation people have over the quality of the product increasing hasn't diminished.
I can't say one way or the other whether the consumer is right about their demands for a new release, at least in the FPS market, mainly because I've been driven away by the abundance of FPS's on the market. What I would like to demonstrate is examples of how annually released games can be handled in both a negative and a positive way.
In the UK and the rest of Europe one of the most popular PC games is Football Manager. For those who are unfamiliar with the game it involves you, err, managing a football team. You don't control the players at all, but you select the players, organise the tactics, buy players and deal with the general aspects that one would expect a club manager to be involved with. It's a highly specialised category of game falling well within the simulation genre of gaming, but it has the kicker of being based around the most popular sport in the world and offers the player the opportunity to answer the burning question any fan has, "What would I do if I was manager?"
The game is released annually and has been since developers Sports Interactive split from publisher Eidos around 2005. Previously the game was made under the name Championship Manager and has been in existence since 1992. In its current state it is a deep, complex game that has an extremely steep learning curve. It is also the only viable football management game on the market today. EA has tried numerous times to conquer it with Total Club Manager and FIFA Manager, but have made no dent in its success. Eidos created a new studio to try and carry on the Championship Manager name, but a lack of quality or depth in the product (Football Manager has a database of almost 400,000 players from over 3,000 volunteer scouts around the globe) has meant the last PC release for Championship Manager was almost two years ago and with no 2012 edition announced at all.
The game is a colossus in the European PC market and the developers have an enviable level of brand loyalty, but underneath that is an undercurrent of dismay at the lack of progression the series makes year-on-year. Yet it still breaks PC sales figures, in the UK at least. This is down to one reason, a lack of competition in the game's genre. A case in point is one of the features touted during the game's announcement in August was the ability to choose the tone you spoke with to your players. That actually features on the back of the box. A few years ago one of the announced features was the ability to select the gender of your manager.
This comes despite the fact the series has overlooked other areas of improvement, most notably the way the game allows users to play each other online. It is so archaic players have to know the IP address of a person they would like to play against and even then there is no option to quick play one team against another. In short it operates the same way people used to have to play multiplayer Doom.
It's embarrassing at times, but understandable. In 2003 they released Championship Manager 4, the first game in the series to feature a 2d representation of the match playing on the screen. The game was so full of bugs it took three patches and almost four months to get it to a level of playability, the developers are scared of upsetting the boat when they have such a clear advantage in the market. To give you an idea of just how much they need to rely on that good faith, their studio head Miles Jacobsen said recently that if a quarter of the people who pirated the game bought a copy; sales figures would double.
One wonders how much that has been down to the ease with which one was able to pirate the game or whether that is the undercurrent of the lack of innovation going into each release bubbling to the surface.
Keeping with the sport theme, it's important to look at the FIFA series over the last few years as an example of how to get it right.
Since time immemorial there has always been FIFA, they have had the licenses to many leagues, they have player likenesses, they have league rights. But the interesting thing was that in the mid-noughties, that didn't stop them being consistently usurped by Pro Evolution Soccer. For one reason and one reason only people chose PES over FIFA in the droves: the gameplay. By 2006 it looked almost as if the FIFA series would never be able to compete.
But they did. The comparison with Football Manager isn't quite fair because the resources EA has available to them are much richer, but it's still an important lesson. EA spent a good few years, while still releasing annually, perfecting the football. Getting the core mechanics of the game right, word spread and people began to flock back. From then on they have spent their time honing the game, each year adding more content, making the game more of a simulation. It seems so obvious but what gamers want out of sports titles is something that is as close to the real thing as possible. The game is always going to be of interest because it is aligned with something as phenomenally popular as football, it's making that a reality that is hard.
EA have been bold, this year they completely rewrote the mechanics of defending, being unafraid of upsetting people who had become comfortable with the game. It was a mechanic that had been in place for over a decade, but instead of just giving fans what they wanted they tried to make the game more tactical and for most people they succeeded.
I know it sounds like fawning, but my admiration for the way EA has approached their franchise is justified. Football Manager and FIFA are games I have bought annually for far too long to remember and I can see real value in the latter whereas I have barely touched my Football Manager game this year. Last year I clocked over 1,000 hours, this year I doubt I'll even reach 200.
Of course it's not just me that believes this, while many annually released franchises have been given more reserved reviews this year FIFA has near universal acclaim, at first I felt it was way over the top. But in time I've released that if your business model is going to release games annually then you could do far worse than copying the FIFA model of not just giving people what they want, but giving them more in a sensible fashion and not being afraid to fuck with their heads a little to challenge them.
To bring it back to the Modern Warfare franchise, the funding is clearly there. Activision are a huge company and in Modern Warfare they have the biggest gaming franchise on the planet. It's theirs to fuck up, despite valiant attempts they don't have any real competition at the moment for the top spot. The question is how they move on from here. On a personal level I don't see myself going back to playing FPS's online regularly until there is a step in innovation that moves it to the next level. When Call of Duty 4 was released it presented a level of map design and shooting mechanics nowhere near as polished that I had ever seen on a console, but now I just see more of the same. But I can't doubt that people who love the genre will follow the same example I do with Football Manager, £40 for a game that gives a year of entertainment is value for money.
As I said at the start I don't have any real solution, I can only apologise for not having some kind of rounding conclusion to the question of where to go from here. But the soothing factor is that as games become even more acceptable as a form of media by the public, more choice will be given to the consumer which means we'll have more choice in voting with our wallets. It may not feel like it at times, but we are in a golden age for video games.
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