Wednesday, September 25, 2013




Now that we are heading straight into the last quarter of this year, I think we can already start to look back and reflect about what happened in the world of video games in 2013. And it was a bad year, right? Everybody who can already see beyond the blinding light of the presentations for this year’s new console releases must think the same. Although the big infotainment industry still wants us to think differently, it was mostly an awful year. For me, it not only made me come up with this blog and brought tears to my eyes every now and then... no, it really made me angry. Have you forgotten all the really bad things that happened this year? The ridiculously bad games that came out, the increasingly strong grip of the security measurements, the most useless operation system ever, how often you couldn’t play a game because it’s online only and your internet was down, how Microsoft tried to pull the most devastating and dirty move in video game history with their new Xbox,…

In case you cannot remember, I encourage you to read on. I will try to remind you about all the bad things of the recent past from my perspective and hopefully at the end you will also see that this was probably one of the worst years video gaming has ever known and furthermore that it absolutely must not continue like this.



Assassin's Creed III

Yes I know, it was actually released in November last year, but since I just started this blog now and I want to encapsulate a whole year...

Was it really so bad? - Actually IGN rated the game with 8.5 and classified the game as "great", so what am I talking about? Well, forget about ingame analysis like graphics, presentation, dialogues or fun factor and let me explain in one single and simple sentence why this game is in my list of worst games from the past year: This game was the most buggy, unfinished and seemingly untested game I have probably ever played! And yes, in this case this totally justifies to flush the game down the toilet. Missions were so full of bugs that I had to play several missions a dozen times. Actually even starting missions was almost impossible from time to time since apparently even if you are inside a dialogue - an event where you had no controls - with an NPC, soldiers were randomly kicking your ass and killing you. Besides that I think, I spare you any more words about the graphic bugs in the game and just sum that up with: Some of the worst graphic bugs I have ever seen in a game. As you may continue to read my blog you will notice that I am probably the last person who will criticize the graphics of a game... I even played Left for Dead with a resolution of 640 x 480 once and enjoyed that a lot, because it had a nice retro look to it. But the graphics engine of Assassin's Creed III was beyond the verge of fraud and more than a rip-off regarding the current state of technological development, in my opinion. If during playing a video game frequently questions like "Have they ever tested that?" or "Did they not play their own game?" come up, then there is something very wrong with the game. And in Assassin's Creed III such questions came up almost every other minute. For me it's clear that this game was unfinished at the release time and that is something I can absolutely not condone!



Halo 4

Jesus Christ! This game is rated with 9.0 by Gamespot and an unbelievable 9.8 by IGN! Who makes these ratings? Let's be fair with 343 Industries and give them some credit; the story was really awesome and took the franchise to a whole new level. And god damn wasn't that something when you flew this fighter jet with high speed through the last stage of the game? The mechanics and physics of the game were even better than in Reach. Also the presentation, the new enemies, weapons and options were overwhelming and put you into probably the biggest sandbox a shooter has ever seen. But aside from that - at least to me it seemed - the community had a consistent opinion that 343 screwed up the multiplayer aspects of the game. Yes, now the game has changed 180° but I am talking about the release or rather the first months after the release. What we got back then wasn't Halo anymore; we got some sort of crippled hybrid between Halo and Call of Duty. And that is something that shouldn't have happened. What were the developers thinking? Probably that they must do some changes to the gameplay of the multiplayer in order to reach also the Call of Duty audience. Well, thank you. In addition to all the small brats playing Halo even though they legally shouldn't, now we have to deal also with CoD-Kids screaming and trolling and cheating on an unprecedented level!

At the beginning there were so many things wrong with the game, the missing "red X" when somebody dies, is just one of the smaller examples. Having only a handful of professions to choose from and above all starting the game in a limited edition setup are some of the more severe mistakes, which showed one policy of 343 clearly: Let's get as much money out of this as we can. Like I said, the game experience in multiplayer has changed by now. Yet this is to the constant efforts of the community telling the developers what they are supposed to do, after the game was released! I don't know about you, but personally I always ask myself the question why I should do the job of the developers. Don't these people know what we want? It's not that this was the first part of the franchise, right? I think here we can see something at work that really emerged just a few years ago. I am talking about wrong innovation in a sense. This is a phenomenon tied strongly to franchising, or rather to games that sort of outlived their life. They are kept alive by artificial means and constantly revived with a new sequel because they had a rather successful predecessor. It is a paradigm of modern game design - if not in everything that we see today - that things have to be innovative. Innovation is a keyword we hear all day long. I would even go so far as to bet that in several fields there is even a job position described as something like "Director of Innovation". But especially when it comes to franchises, innovation is obviously understood in a wrong way. To me it seems when developers today start with the conception of a sequel to a game, they start first by erasing all that was there and begin from scratch, because they think that way they will be innovative. This is what I understand when I am talking about wrong innovation. Of course during the process they also add things (characteristics, weapons, characters, etc.) from the predecessor but it is only logical that doing a sequel that way also a lot of things will be forgotten. So in the end we will always have something new - something allegedly innovative - yet several things that we took for granted will be missing. Did you never have a thought like: "Wait, I could do that in the last game. Where is this function now?" or "Why did they change the map? The old map system was perfect.". - This is what I am talking about. And this is a disease among modern day games. What we are getting since a few years before is nothing more than lies. We think we get something new, yet we hope we will get the same. They tell us we will get something new, yet we get the same. And when we start to accept that we got the same, just then we can see the truth: We neither got something new, nor did we get the same. Because what is supposed to be new is never as good as the original and what's supposed to be the same is simply missing.

I think this issue is more philosophical in nature and probably the fault of that lies within us gamers to a certain degree as well. I honestly don't want to blame solely the developers. But what can we all do to change that ridiculous cycle of franchising? I think first, if they have to deal with a franchise, developers should be innovative by adding only and not by subtraction and replacement. Secondly and in general, we should all stop this franchising model and make new games instead. If it is really a new game developers can do what they want and gamers will never have to struggle with their expectations. Just let it rest. Give it a while. Don't do a new Halo for the next five years. Concentrate on new projects. People will still buy it. Unfortunately as simply as this solution sounds, given how the industry is tied to "safe" projects and revenue predictions from the side of the publishers, it seems very unlikely this will happen soon. And actually given then god-like position of publishers I highly doubt game designers will have absolute freedom even if they made a completely new game. But anyway, we were talking about Halo 4, right? Well, I think Halo 4 wasn't a bad game. And it definitely is one of the best shooters now, since 343 listened to the community and in the end made a lot of changes. Nevertheless, when it first came out it was a big disappointment and it took more than half a year until the stench of greed and money making finally vanished from that game. And we still have connection problems by the way! Seriously, this game couldn't even keep stabile and therefore fair connections during the big Halo 4 Global Championship! I stopped playing after the second week because the game didn't even count three of my games due to system malfunctions. I played 22 games during the second week, just to make sure I will still have the 20 necessary games. I already knew that the system obviously was flawed and didn't count all games from the first week. Well, in the second week it didn't count three games. I am deeply sorry, but if you want to do an online tournament is it too much to ask that you please solve your network issues! Reach was lagging too every now and then, but in Halo 4 almost every second game suffers from at least one badly connected peer and is hence unbalanced, unfair and destroys the gaming experience on a frequent basis.



Diablo III

And what a letdown this was. You know, players my age tend to think of Diablo in a different way. For us Diablo really meant something. I remember playing this game during the programming lessons in school... actually the whole class was playing the game while the teacher coded Mandelbrot sets in html. - Very exciting stuff. You probably won't believe it but I even beat Diablo on the PlayStation. Absolutely legitimate and with all the tedious loading times! This game had so many people so deeply under its spell. When the sequel came out we couldn't believe what we got in our hands. Of course players all over the world were looking forward to Diablo III. But yet again this eager anticipation should be quickly turn into a big disappointment for a lot of players. I will not go too much into detail about this game - at least not here. But since I still like it very much I am sure there will be a lot more probably Diablo III only related posts in the future. Let me here just mention the biggest flaw of the game, a strategy that single handedly brought the game to its knees: The Auction House. Much more than many other games Diablo was always about the loot. About killing monster and being rewarded with items that made you stronger. What game designing mind could have ever come up with the idea to put an economy behind that basic principle. It's like sticking a fork into a jack. It couldn't have worked, never! And besides the struggle that we legitimate players had to cope because if this system the question remains why they did it.

My first educated guess is because of the money. Since I am a bit of a conspiracy theorist, I am sure they have tried to pull that off as an attempt to control the game via its drops. Yes, the game is allegedly as RNG as it can get, but if you want to have an economy system like the auction house running in the background, you can hardly leave it to chance, can you? Some sort of system must check of which items too many exist on the market and therefore reduce the drop rate for this item. After all real people (including Blizzard) earn real money from the system. As far as I can remember the Diablo III auction house was the biggest attempt to tie a virtual economy together with the real economy and I am glad it failed tremendously. Is it not bad enough how far we've come already? We buy new games for the full value, yet we get only 50 to 80 percent of the games because nowadays they are already conceived to be complete only with expansions, addons and downloadable content. In the end we already pay twice as much to get a full game. And where does it stop? We even pay for virtual accessories? Or how did you get this nice T-Shirt for your avatar? I utterly disgust terms or rather strategies like free2play or pay2win and in its core essence this is what Diablo had become. Fortunately also in this case Blizzard did a good job working together with the community and managed to made the game better with every single patch since release. Finally they also understood their mistake with the auction house and the announced the complete removal of the system next year. It's news like this that keep me believing in the fact that developers do care. Nevertheless given all the mistakes and problems with Diablo 3 at release and the following months after, it is unfortunately one of the biggest letdowns of the past year. None of these problems were necessary or not avoidable from the start. If developers want to prevent such problems with such highly anticipated titles, I think it's about time they understand the importance of the community and more actively connect to the players before and especially during development!



Aliens: Colonial Marines

I could probably fill pages just with this game title, but again I will try to keep it to the essentials. In this case... well, there is only one word that describes this game: Fraud. How much have we waited for this game? It was shortly after the turn of the century when we got the first information that a video game about the Alien movie franchise was in development. Not the first video game about Alien - actually we had quite a few already. Most noticeable are definitely Alien Trilogy on the PlayStation and Aliens vs. Predator on the PC back in the 90s. Somehow it's an unspoken truth for fans of the Alien movies that the second part Aliens was the best of them. So naturally we all were eager to one day play this game. Well, about twelve years later that day had come and... to be honest, when I first played it, I didn't know if I was supposed to laugh, to cry or to take the game and throw it out of the window. Again, I am probably the last person to judge a game by its graphics, but this game was easily the worst thing I had seen in years! In addition it was absolutely dull, full of bugs and way too easy, including a complete lack of care on the part of the developers. This game seemed like it was right in the middle of development and had still a good year or more to go before release. So here we go, that is the fraud. They just released it because they had to, and that's not right! Some greedy smart asses just decided to try it, you know, like: "Ok, we just release it. The players out there are too stupid. They will just buy it and nobody will notice that we would actually need one more year to finish the game." - Well, wrong thought!

Please stop trying to rip us off! We are not stupid and things like this are far below the belt. And while this case is since discussed in game development related classes all over the world as best example under the label "How not to do a game", apparently one of the biggest lawsuits of videogame history is still ongoing. It seems to take a lot of time until all the damage is assessed completely. Maybe the responsible parties have also already settled? To be honest, I don't know and actually I don't care so much. Finding someone to blame, speaking guilt,... that's not important and I am sure, if someone will ever be legally blamed for this it will surely smallest developer or any small outsourcing studio somewhere, where undoubtedly everyone gave their best under the circumstances. The fact remains that this happened! That the industry actually tried to take us for fools! Hopefully this will not be forgotten to quickly and you will all remember that incident for a long time. I am sure this was not the last time...



Windows 8

It's not just games where the industry tries to play dirty with us. How about Microsoft and how they try to force Windows 8 on consumers? We all know Windows 8 is like Windows Vista. A trial version, a program designed as public beta test before the real operation system comes out. Vista was just bad, but it gave Microsoft all the things they needed to make Windows 7 good and successful. Now we experience the same with Windows 8. But here it's even more obvious what the real purpose behind the system is; With tablets, smart phones, smart books and even the Xbox Microsoft's goal is clearly to unify all this systems into one gigantic and universal software. Easy to connect and even easier to supervise and control. The first step towards the Microsoft Cloud and the final dispossession of consumers.

And that's not only the cause with Microsoft. In case you haven't noticed: Welcome to the digital economy 2.0! Greed and fear of the loss of revenues together with evolving technology have finally made it possible; You can't have anymore possession in the near future. For example on a monthly basis you can just pay for using things from a virtual store called the cloud. You will no longer hold something in your hands. You will have to accept any updates and price changes or you will no longer be able to use technology. Now you still can buy a new laptop with Windows 7, although it is quite strange the same or better  types of laptops are cheaper when Windows 8 is installed. But mark my words, we are just a few years away before there is no turning back. Apple is even openly thriving to create devices without any drives. - No DVD-Drive, no hard disc drive, etc. You can just turn it on and off. Not even your personal data will belong to you in form of real substance anymore. It will be saved on some server - somewhere in the endless realms of the virtual space. If you don't pay your monthly fee you can probably not even access your data anymore! Sometimes I ask myself how so many so smart people cannot realize that and at least raise their voice and try to prevent it before it's too late.



Xbox One

But what was probably the biggest letdown in the past year of gaming? Who did try to pull the most ridiculous move in videogame history? - Yes, again Microsoft. I sincerely hope you all still remember that exciting days in May this year. The Xbox One reveal in Washington? You remember: Always online, always under Kinect surveillance, can't borrow games from friends, can't sell your used games anymore? In your face kiddies! Retrospectively it dawned on me why Don Mattrick "has never been so excited in his long carrier" before these "revolutionary changes". What can I say about this scandal that wasn't already ragingly discussed by millions of players all over the world, right after the presentation? I think I would like to try and speculate about the big picture behind this radical Microsoft strategy, which in the end had to change drastically - yet again, thanks to the big and obviously smarter than expected community out there! I think Microsoft wanted to secure the whole market of entertainment in one big move. All the preparations were done; all the smart devices on this planet were unified and being watched under "smart glasses", the gamers as well as many other people used their Xbox for entertainment were connected massively over the Live-Service provided by Microsoft and even the new Master Control Program, swiftly called Windows 8, was forced onto the users. If you don't get where I am going at, just ask the question what would have happened if they had succeeded. Most of the people would be completely dependent on Microsoft.

In my opinion the whole purpose of the new Xbox One system was a new attempt to unify and interconnect as much systems and devices as possible with the help of Windows 8. In case you haven't noticed; Windows 8 sacrificed all utility and freedom to do what you want with your computer in the name of usability. In other words it's bad for business if users can still install their own programs and use software that they prefer and it's much better for business if also small children can use computers the way they are used to from their cell phones. That's killing two birds with one stone. And the Xbox One seemed more like one big puzzle piece in order to force this new system of usability onto the people than what it should have been: A great next generation gaming system. In fact, as countless people already stated, the Xbox One seemed more like a modern Media-Box to control your TV or a DVD-Player than a console for video games. Whether this theory is right or wrong, I think one thing can be said for certain. That is, that it's never standard business with Microsoft. They always have a plan. They don't want just simply produce a gaming platform and earn a few bugs on the console market. They always have a much bigger plan. They want get as much out of what they do in as many different markets as possible. And since today it is all about information and connection, I am sure their most basic goal was and most likely still is to get as many people using their internet services as possible. Here is one fact you probably didn't know: This was even the very reason why the Xbox project was started back in the late 90s. It's not that Microsoft ever wanted to give us consoles for our pleasure. In fact they were concerned with loosing lots and lots of customers to internet services and networks provided by Sony or even Nintendo back at the beginning of this century. They simply wanted to get or rather hold people using their services of connection and the PC didn't hold up to a new generation. This is why they initially started to enter the console market! Yes the fact that they did a damn well job with their first Xbox remains, but the reason Xbox exists is not because video games were so important for Microsoft. And why did the first Xbox work so well? Because there was one person in charge who really understood who a video game system must work - Seamus Blackley. He knew about giving people a device to play as well an easy to handle and understand sandbox for developers. This in turn is also the reason why for example Halo is the franchise it is today!

But those days are gone and whether you choose to believe what I told, wheter you even care, the fact remains that Microsoft saw a bigger picture with their absurd policy regarding the Xbox One. And this picture obviously had not so much things with games in common than it did with connectivity, money and DRM. Fortunately you, the people, stood up once more and showed them that they cannot rip us off. That we are not stupid and that at least we - the older generation of gamers - know precisely what we want and what we buy. Since Xbox One was absolutely not selling they had to change their policy and thanks to that, by now everything - except the fact that Kinect will still be watching you and allegedly can never be turned off - everything is back to normal. Even Don Mattrick was more or less silently excused from Microsoft. Be he just the public scapegoat or not, some of his statements were just completely misplaced. I hope Microsoft has learned their lesson, I really do. And I hope if one day they should decide to implement all this terrifying "features" again, for example with some system update that you "have to accept" or "you will be signed out from Xbox-Live", again a big scream will rapture their networks and force them to retreat.



We are the gamers and we have the power! We simply should not talk take all the trash that's happening for granted. We don't have to buy everthing without question and rational thought. We have to be responsible! Not just for us... This is something we have to pass on to the next generation of gamers. Look again at the past year of gaming, at all the rip offs and scandals... It cannot continue like this.