The Plan vs. The Reality

[CaptHawkeye]

A little thread to shed some sheer bile against the hilarious and utter failures of gaming.

Headsets and Live Communications

The Plan - Developers believed that by forcing communication headsets with online enabled titles and systems, they would usher in a new age of online teamwork and co-operative play. Team games would be more organized than ever, with team mates verbally covering each other's backs, guarding objectives and carrying out precision attacks even in games as frantic as twitch shooters.

The Reality - Little more than an oral vitriol conveyor. The idea that live comms would magically lead to a world of casual yet organized team games is little more than a pipe dream. It turns out that a combination of poor UI design, lack of enthusiasm for team play, and simple inexperience damn communication headsets. Spending eternity in a level of video game hell reserved for trash talking, racist insults, and pre-pubescent 12 years olds vehemently projecting their pent-up teen angst.

Did anyone survive? - Headsets are great for talking to friends you already have. If you have them that is.

Game Journalism

The Plan - Like that of movie critics, gaming journalism would pledge its life to the goal of protecting consumers from artistically or technically ignorant, broken, or downright offensive titles. The journalists would shoulder the burden of playing before Joe Consumer, thus alerting him to a title that may be below standards. Immune to the effects of marketing, journalists would in fact combat the efforts of publishers to market bog standard or broken titles.

The Reality - Like that of movie critics, gaming journalists are frequently tools of the marketing. Journalists usually work for companies who either work closely with video game publishers, or are even owned by a publisher. Thus creating an enviornment where the journalist is essentially not allowed to trash talk any game except for those which are overwhelmingly poor. Or any game which the publisher has already pre-ordained failure/success for. When not accepting large sums of money to say laughably nice things, journalists are often fanboys themselves. It turns out the most helpful type of reviewer doesn't need a push at all, and will staunchly defend and propagate a genre or design of his favor. He will give a game 10/10 reviews basically for being just like a game he played when he was a kid.

Did Anyone Survive? - Reviewers tend to be useful to get the overall gist of a game's quality. Usually in the review you can occasionally find a useful sentence or two that actually describes the game. Unless the reviewer self-contradicts himself a lot. Which is more common than you would think.

Metal Gear Solid

The Plan - Hideo Kojima's magnum opus. A game with an enticing world of slick stealth action, against the backdrop of an epic storyline. Playing as Solid Snake, the player will work his way through enviornments populated by realistic, challenging enemies who are satisfying to evade as they are to defeat.

The Reality - Rarely amounts to much more than a glorified puzzle. 90% of game is basically understanding the patrol route of each guard and timing your movement around them. Controls are clunky, and performing simple actions usually leads to ridiculous cases of Snake walking right into a guard's back, or being unable to draw his pistol while he is doused in automatic fire. Storyline is totally borked, clearly didn't get beyond the first storyboard. Plot quickly loses coherency while making references to invisible points and characters that never really mean anything. Merely being a way for the plot to disguise its disorganization as some kind of master plan.

Did Anyone Survive? - It took all the way to the 4th game to finally make the series a little bit exciting. It also took all the way to the 4th game for journalists to realize that Kojima basically stopped writing the story years ago, and has been mailing post-it notes to the script writers on ideas he had while sitting on the shitter at the local bar.

[Stark]

The voice chat thing is hilariously bad on games like RDR. YOU TOO can listen for hours to stoner retards drone on about how after a few cones it's LIKE YOU'RE REALLY A COWBOY MANNNN. That said, when you're lucky enough to meet people who aren't wankers, it's pretty cool. THEREALCANADIAN, props!

How about the Total War games? It started as a boardgame with tactical combat, then became some kind of mind-cult about GRAND STRATEGIES and such, despite never, ever a) working b) having any AI c) having any historicity.

[Enforcer Talen]

o_O Im in ventrilo right now, on my guild account. We do raid pretty frequently, and having the headphones is a godsend.

Not saying that it works for twitchshooters, but for serious raiders, its fantastic.

[Stark]

He JUST SAID it works great if you actually know people.

The concept of being a 'serious raider' is hilarious, however.

[General Zod]

The Reality - Little more than an oral vitriol conveyor. The idea that live comms would magically lead to a world of casual yet organized team games is little more than a pipe dream. It turns out that a combination of poor UI design, lack of enthusiasm for team play, and simple inexperience damn communication headsets. Spending eternity in a level of video game hell reserved for trash talking, racist insults, and pre-pubescent 12 years olds vehemently projecting their pent-up teen angst.

Turns out this issue isn't really an issue at all if you use a bit of discretion about who you game with?

[Stark]

Public groups everywhere are horrid. Nothing better than WiCtards screaming 'shoot that tank' like anyone knows what they're talking about.

[CaptHawkeye]

Turns out this issue isn't really an issue at all if you use a bit of discretion about who you game with?

But let's face it, the idea of close knit friend groups on Live was an afterthought. It took Microsoft 5 years to figure out how to design Xbox Live around Parties and not around random encounters with strangers. Sony and Nintendo still haven't figured that out.

Customizable Loadouts and Characters

The Plan - Designed to give the player choice in how he plays the game. By allowing the player to design the world around his style of play, the predictable nature of a game's design can be somewhat circumvented. Allowing for truly exciting and unpredictable gameplay.

The Reality - The vast nature of choices is usually slaughtered when it becomes apparent that their are certain trends in the customizing which are better to follow than others. A power curve develops, and gamers, the ever sensitive and over-entitled brats that they are, will conform to mindlessly.

Did Anyone Survive? - Fuck no.

[Starglider]

The Reality - The vast nature of choices is usually slaughtered when it becomes apparent that their are certain trends in the customizing which are better to follow than others. A power curve develops, and gamers, the ever sensitive and over-entitled brats that they are, will conform to mindlessly.

No surprise to anyone who paid any attention to competitive play of fighting games. They all have character tiers and two or three 'serious' characters for tournament play.

Game journalism sucking doesn't matter as much as it used to. These days you can find a game blog or two that's decently written and broadly matches your own tastes (whatever they might be), and that'll do a better job. e.g. I like to read blogs about XBL indie games that no major game site would bother to cover. A lot more convenient than skimming the appropriate newsgroups for non-crap amateur reviews, back in the mid 90s

[Cykeisme]

The point about live voice communication is awesomely hilarious only because it's so sadly true. Mostly hilarious, though.
Same goes for game journalism.. just like the voice comm, we learn to ignore it as idle chatter.


I like the point about customizable loadouts and characters, which I agree with on many levels.
In team games, the only time people have different loadouts/configs are when there are different roles to fulfil in the game, eg specializing at close range or long range, or for survivability or damage. However, optimal "builds" for each role are quickly discovered, and people will only use those carbon copy "builds".
It effectively becomes not much more than preset player classes like in the original Team Fortress (although due to customizability being the trend, there are options even within each class in TF2).

In one-on-one games, the whole thing falls right through the floor. Even with preset choices, it's certainly the case with fighting games, as Starglider pointed out.
Ultimately, any attempt to make interesting and varied characters inevitably results in "tiers" of characters as the metagame develops, invariably ending with only the top tier of characters appearing in serious competitive play.
A developer simply cannot foresee the things people will come up with, as unsurprisingly, the skill and observation of a large player base begins to weed out what traits are beneficial and which are merely 'interesting'.

It takes a stroke of remarkable genius in the game design (unlikely), or constant iterations of refinement to make "balanced" choices available in the game.. that is to say, having all the choices viable in competition where winning is the goal. In a game released as downloadable content, these iterations can be rapid.. in arcade games, it will be whole sequels before the balance issues are addressed, but the delay in response is too slow.