So yesterday I was reading all the “Happy Birthday Xbox” articles and couldn’t stop thinking about the death of the Dreamcast and the direct boom of the Xbox. The start of a proper online facility for multiplayer goodness for consoles.
But this got my mind running on how the Xbox changed the current state of gaming. Who knew that one thing namely Xbox LIVE could have such an adverse effect on gaming state. The Dreamcast died which made space for the Xbox to slip in to the running. But if it was not for Xbox we would not have Xbox live and also Sony and Nintendo would neither have launched PSN or wiiconnect24 respectively. Sure it would have happened eventually but I think that LIVE caused them to speed up the process.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think the online services are fantastic. Network services were done in previous consoles but the Dreamcast was the first console to be shipped specifically with multiplayer in mind. But LIVE brought in DLC, which at the time seemed like a good idea to me. It’s something small that could extend a good game. But I never saw how badly this could be exploited until the last year or so. It all started with Oblivion and the Horse Armour DLC which launched and people moaned about the price, yet they bought it. This was a green light for many publishers and developers alike and now the market is flooded. Good examples of DLC are the Fallout: New Vegas DLC’s… Bad examples are Mass Effect, Call of Duty, Gears of War and basically 90% of DLC out there that they can milk. Be it a new character skin, outfit, weapon pack even. It has become tacked on additions that normally would have been included in the original package. It gets so bad that mid-game in Dragon Age: Origins you cannot accept a certain quest because you have insufficient Bioware Points. Now if you’re going to have it as DLC, remove it from the game and do not show the quest if you do not have it. All this DLC, Micro-Transactions and stuff are getting out of hand.
It’s also killed the imagination of games with the multiplayer aspect as games used to have a good single player campaign and an additional multiplayer aspect. Now they make games mainly for multiplayer and give players like me who enjoy story and character with a bitter taste in my mouth. Games are being allowed to have a 6-7 hour campaign as a standard. And as an RPG lover this is ridiculously short. The new annual Call of Duty: MW3 (Or as I refer to it as Cash on Delivery 2011) has a 5 hour campaign. Which I think is ridiculous. With the premium price of console games now it should be frowned upon the fact that you can finish a game in one day. And they back their sad excuse of a campaign with it being aimed at the multiplayer experience. Sorry, not everyone in the world that owns a console has a good internet connection or even support for the relative online service in their country. But why would they be worried if the manage to push 9.5 million copies on launch day. And you can’t try to sell many of them when completed as they have an online pass that needs to be activated and if it has been used don’t fret, because you can always buy another pass… Ka-Ching!
Also online facilities on consoles have made developers lazy because many don’t do proper QA on their games before launch knowing that they can just release a patch later on and thus using its audience as testers. But that is another topic on its own.
But not all things are bad. People that know me are aware that I love indie games and support indie developers. And these online facilities are a platform for these games. Absolute gems like Braid, Machinarium, Shadow Complex, Bastion and Trine would have never seen the light of day and that would have been sad.
As a PC gamer it saddens me a bit because this whole exploitation has moved over onto the PC platform I love. But it makes money so you can see why they would do it. It has pushed gaming into the mainstream. And has filled online services with “Duders”, “Brah’s” and 16 year old kids screaming over the mics in an 18 and up game. But luckily there are some great houses like “CDProjekt RED” that bring out games like The Witcher 2 that keeps my faith in gaming industry. I’m not sure if I’m one of the few that feel this way but I can be sure that many of the others that echo my sentiment would mainly be PC gamers around before the exploitation… when games were great, they were there to immerse you as opposed to exploiting glitches to have the best K/D ratio, who stop midgame and admire the effort put in to the artwork instead of moaning that it’sDX9 when it should have been 11 and who became the character as opposed to doing things they never would have done just to get “Cheevo’s”.
