Fingers crossed

The hard drive I save all my podcast files on is having trouble right now, so I’m hoping it hasn’t decided to lose everything.

In other news, my life is coming around nicely. I don’t have much new to post since last time, since I’ve been sort of…boring recently. Sticking to the diet, keeping my life relatively organized, getting mail from the IRS saying they sent me more money, you know, life is good.

So what should I complain about this time…

Well, E3 is happening. That’s the show where video game industry professionals get together to show off pieces of new games that look good in screenshots, but don’t actually tell us about what those games will actually look like, or play like. This wasn’t always the case. The PS2, the Gamecube, the initial Xbox information was very impressive. The problem is, as time wore on, video games stopped being only for those who could understand tech specs. The mainstream market wanted to know what was going on. And so companies obliged them.

The Wii demo had one of the most foundational men in video games pretending to play an invisible instrument. The Kinect saw a man standing on stage, pretending that he was controlling prerecorded footage with his flailing arms. Another man, while winning a game against a woman, said some things that are the kinds of words you expect before sexual assault. The entire Mr. Caffeine thing. The entire hashtag lady wood thing. Cars, and celebrities, and rappers, which isn’t the same thing as celebrities, I guess.

Hard drive update. I can open the file on my laptop, so now I’m transferring everything off that drive to a new drive, I ran an extension cable from the port where I knew the drive worked before, and eventually, I’ll try it again.

OK, back to E3. Does this mean that the games have been better? Or faster, or stronger, or harder? Despite what Daft Punk would lead you to believe, not really. Prettier, maybe, but that’s a product of the hardware. If they could have made photorealistic graphics, orchestral soundtracks, and 300 hours of dialogue in the 80s, they probably would have. But those games succeeded in part because they embraces the limitations that they had, and made the most of them. Now, there basically are no limits. Developers promise the stars, and to realize that dream, they either work their staff near death, delay the game beyond what they promise time and again, release it before it’s ready, or a combination of the three.

Some games can come out of this quagmire of hype, with hard work. No Man’s Sky is the best example. The marketing was full of both actual empty promises (a game advertising finding any old planet you want was using the same, stable, interesting planet for multiple tech demos) and over-promising (the lead creative director was making statements their team wasn’t ready to follow through on). The game came out, it was buggy, it was lacking lots of features, and it was bland. So what did they do? They paid their staff with the existing game sales, and kept working. Free update after free update, improving the game, fixing the bugs, adding the features, spicing up the world. Years after its release, it’s finally the game that people wanted, and you don’t have to spend any extra money to get that version of the game.

Contrast this with Fallout 76. The problems with this game are numerous, and I’m certainly not the first person, or best person, to be explaining that. But since this is a blog that “normal” people might read, here’s a brief summary. Fallout 4, the previous game, wasn’t bad. They decided to make another one, but this time, you could play it with your friends. This is something that you couldn’t do in Fallout 4. Turns out, playing with your friends is not as simple as checking a box that says “internet on”, and the game was a pile of problems on release. Since then, the company has had multiple bad PR moves, including cancelling promised and paid for real-life products, and accidentally posting customer’s contact information to their website. The game is not awful now, but a lot of that has come from paid expansion packs. To get the “proper” version of the game costs more than just buying the game.

And that’s the crux of it, really. Big studios have realized that you can now sell 80% of a game for the same price as a full game, and then tack on the remaining 20% as “bonus content”. Not every game is subject to this, even games that include paid bonus content. Borderlands 3 had a garbage plot, but it was contained, the gameplay was fun, and at the end, it didn’t feel like there was something missing, aside from the dignity of multiple characters. Super Smash Bros Ultimate released with 75 playable characters and 103 playable stages, which would have been a fine place to end, but they’ve made, what, 10 more characters since then, and are still making more?

Industry professionals will probably point to the used game market as the reason behind getting their money’s worth with bonus content. But that market is dwindling, in comparison to the digital market. Now you can release the game without having to pay for making DVDs, boxes, or shipping. And everyone who wants your game needs to buy it in a way that gives you a percentage, rather than giving that percentage to Game Stop (who is still in business somehow). Now, more than ever, games should be cheaper to release.

I’m probably going to keep ranting about the game market for a long time if I don’t decide to stop, so I’m going to decide to stop. I have opinions, and these opinions are definitely from an outsider that has only ever worked in game retail, and never as a developer, tester, artist, etc. Please, if someone finds this and has real world experience that proves me wrong, I would love to hear from you.

Song of the Week: The Games We Played by Torley Wong. As it was explained to me when I first found this file on the internet, there is no sheet music to this. He either had this memorized, or just knew the melodies and riffed on them all in one go. Anyways, this is a 17 minute piano medley of classic video game music. And I mean classic. It lists the games in the video description, and I think the most recent one is Final Fantasy Crystal, from…checks Google…2003. And if you discount that one, then we’re talking about 1999 at the latest.