The boredom the game industry can breed
I love video games in a way many people in my life have never understood. My parents never really grasped my fascination with my Nintendo 64, and I can’t remember a girlfriend who looked with more than a passing curiosity on my favorite pastime. As much as I love certain games and certainly gaming as a whole, times like the present are far too familiar.
I’m bored with gaming. Deeply bored. I still play DotA 2 on a regular basis, though mostly because it gives me a chance to connect with my gaming friends. Updates for the game are coming slowly, even on Valve time. With the wide array of heroes yet to be added, the game is a long way from complete, and further still from seeing any kind of evolution on the status quo.
Beyond that, the industry’s recent releases have been half-hearted iterations on the latest classics, and even for those the cost of entry is steep. SWTOR was my gleaming hope for a while there, but the beta was a tragic disappointment, even if it did save me $60. Kingdoms of Amalur had some promise, but my enjoyment would have been short-lived. Games as long on dialogue as Amalur have always bored me, which is why I’ll likely be passing on Mass Effect 3. I certainly will be for the initial cost of the game.
In some ways I think the recent wave of quality indie games has ruined the big publisher model for me. When I can easily get the same or more enjoyment from a $20 alpha investment, it gets difficult to justify spending three times as much for some pretty graphics and a few big names on that expensive box. Seriously, if the likes of R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane can’t pull together an original and compelling world, why pay the premium on their names?
The future doesn’t look much more promising. Diablo 3 is still on the horizon but I can’t help wondering if the grindy style will be interesting enough. Mass Effect 3 is out there, but I’m not a fan of BioWare’s over-valuation of dialogue and dialogue choices. The one bright light remains Guild Wars 2, but that game sounds so ambitious it almost seems like it has already fallen short.
What are you playing? Or is there something you can’t wait to play?
Posted in: Reviews
Tags: big publishers, diablo, diablo 3, guild wars 2, kingdoms of amalur
I feel your pain. I’ve been spending time lately playing Dark Souls for console, it has been a pretty good time sink of frustration. Although, I do enjoy the raid boss/dungeon feeling of almost every encounter in a single player game. I’ve even got back into playing Magic the Gathering, the online version has been holding most of my time lately.
I will probably buy ME3 just to pass the time. I enjoyed the other 2, so even though I’m not super excited about the third installment, I’ll play it. Diablo 3 will be great, but I’m personally looking forward to XCOM: Enemy Unknown. My of my childhood favorites is come back to life!
I know what you mean I sank $7 into mine craft 2 years ago and latly I’ve been enticed by an industrial craft/builcraft combo mod. I’ve been passing on most major titles, the only release I’m looking for is journey an indie title coming to ps3 like I’ve ever seen.
On a side note the most fun I’ve had in months was our team decided to sign up for go4lol weekly online tournament #50. I can’t tell you then last time I had fun like that in an online game. And it was all free. A solid 6 hours of entertainment for me and 4 friends, later we stuck around to watch the finals. When we got knocked out just before the semifinals.
The only triple a titles to part me with my money this year have been arkham city, skyrim, and bf3. I scoffed at the new call of duty and uncharted 3 is the only game on my radar ATM, I’ve got an ich for a good JRPG but I can’t damn well find one.
I’ve wanted a PS3 since before it appeared in stores, and never got enough money to buy one,so I have almost an entire new universe of gaming to look forward to.
ME3. You can’t pass that up, it’ll be 2 gud fo sho.
Yeah I’m getting tired of the games I’ve been playing; after 3000 matches of LoL it’s getting a bit stale
not really sure what other games are out there that are co-op and fun like that…
Buildcraft is a blast, and I bet Industrial Craft is just as cool. It looks that way from the videos I’ve seen. Unfortunately, neither mod solves Minecraft’s biggest problem, at least as far as a game is concerned: there is nothing to do with the resources. The resources just lead to more resources. The game lacks any real developmental arc or progression. That wouldn’t be a bad thing if the game were more committed to being a sandbox, but right now it has one foot in the sandbox and the other just barely on the edge of a game.
I wish Notch would have chosen a solid direction for Minecraft. He could have dedicated all of the development to exploration and building, creating new biomes, block types, redstone assets, increased world height (coming, I know), expanded the nether, etc. The charming nature of world-building would have been dramatically augmented with that sort of update.
He could also have dedicated development to a more adventure/platformer driven experience. Increase the number of monsters, give varying difficulty structures, add items and accessories like the Aether mod did – hell, buy the Aether mod or pay the community behind it to develop more – flesh out the pvp features, and on and on. Again, a dramatic augmentation of the fun that already exists.
Instead we got potions, which are mostly useless and totally unnecessary thanks to the ease of dispatching monsters. Same goes for enchanting – a total clusterfuck of a system, especially since high-level enchants essentially require you to have a mob grinder, which trashes a server’s memory. Dogs and cats? Cute? Maybe. The only real use for them is as creeper wards, which essentially removes the most difficult part of the game. Now we’re getting redstone lamps, which function exactly like glowstone except that they can be powered off. There’s essentially one use for that – mob spawners. There is literally no other use for them.
All of that is to say nothing of an API. Why a game with such a prolific modding community has no modding API at this point is beyond me. People are doing work for Mojang for free and Mojang is essentially gouging that work every time they make an update. Frustrated modders have abandoned amazing projects because they’re sick of playing code doctor every time Mojang adds something useless to the game.
Don’t get me wrong – I still think Minecraft is the most influential game of the decade, but to see how little Mojang has made of the game in the past couple years is disheartening. I do hope that someone out there is working on a successor to the Minecraft throne. I know plenty of people that would be willing to jump ship for either a more developed sandbox or a more focused adventure version with a sandbox backbone.