If your gonna post to this thread, please read the damned OP!
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It's that time of the week again when I just...well...get PISSED OFF and must channel my anger through cyberspace in the form of thousands of thousands of words of ranting.
Today's blasphemy which I shall rebuke involves those sacrilegious bro gamers (aka, the casual middle school students who scream everytime a new CoD comes out) are ruining gaming. Actually, before I delve into their sins, I shall point out that not all bro gamers are, in fact, just middle school students who scream everytime a new CoD comes out. Bro gamers make up80%(Correction: The number is actually 65%) of all gamers. Who are these patrons? Bro gamers can be described simply as casual gamers who only play the 'best' games (Whatever their definition of 'best' games is). They don't have the money to go out and buy twenty different games a year. They don't have the time to play four hours a day. They only get one or two games that they really want a year, and they spend their hour of game time a day playing the best/their most favorite game they have. These guys don't really want to spend 15 minutes or so going onto [Insert Game Here]Wiki to find out how they can be better. They just get home, undress, toss a potpie in the microwave, turn on their console, put in their best game, and just jam for the little time they have. They want to maximize their fun in the little time and skills they have.
Now that I have cleared things up a bit, back to the rebuking. As I was saying, this class of gamers are, in much part, ruining gaming. I am not saying that all of them are. To the contrary, I say that most of them mean well. But...there are many who are doing otherwise, and their actions are helping to ruin gaming. They are 1. ruining games for everyone by encouraging the industry to unilaterally change their policies and mechanics to cater to their whims, and 2. they are ruining interactions with other players.
This is something pretty bold to say. Yes, I know, there are several other reasons why these changes in the industry are happening. (For those interested, you should read one of my previous rants about the nasty changes being made to the industry: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-of-It!-(Rant)
First of, continuing off of my I'm Sick and Tired of It thread, I will say that bro gamers are heavily contributing the changes in the industry. There used to be a time...there used to be a time...oh right! Yes, I'm not so supposed to be remembering the good ole days and to be prophesying. There used to be a time when developers didn't make games with the sole intent of making money. They didn't just go, "Hey! I wanna make money. I'm gonna make a video game. I'm gonna steal all these other ideas, looks back into the 'Great Book of Stock Video Game Essentials the Supposedly Everyone Must Get', put up a big, huge advertizing campaign and 'wow' people by pushing all their buttons with nice sounding lines. (I ripped this from the above link). ''What your about to see is a non scripted event that has occurred in our dynamic, living world,'' (which actually happens because said event only takes place there once has done X, Y, and Z, and never repeats itself afterwards). ''What your about to see is the culmination of (insert imaginary number here) years of professional, dedicated work that has finally come to fruition.'' And then they whirl up a gigantic hype storm, get people to buy hundreds of thousands of preorders; they start announcing expansion packs (actually cut from the vanilla game to be sold as DLC later) before release even happens...yeah, you know the drill.
There used to be a time when game developers handcrafted their products with passion. They wanted to pioneer new ideas and try new things. They took risks. "I don't wanna use that classic, 'kill 10 mobs to level up' formula anymore. I want to try a system where your character is developed reflective of how you play. I want to try out a system where each of your skills has it's own XP bar that is progressed through using them, and leveling up a few of these together levels your character up." Or, they went "I'm gonna spend weeks on my own time developing my own, unique art style. I'm going to ask for feedback on this artstyle, and once I perfect it, that artstyle is going to be the imagery of my game." Or, in a much more recent case; "I'm not going to compose typical fantasy music for this game. I wanna do something original; I will use a clever combination of oriental, African, and Nordic music concepts. Even if most people don't like it, I don't care, because they are not my target audience. And my target audience will praise me for this originality."
It was an age...an age long gone; forgotten by the generation of today. An age where quality was held over quantity.
The abusive bro gamers of today have been whining. "But I don't want to have to play through a short, twenty hour long game where there are only three major, awesome battles in it. I don't want to play through a 50 hour long story that's mostly talking. I want instant action right now, all the time! And I don't want to ever lose. If the game is going to be fun, I have to win all the time, and the game is too hard if I can even die once. Because I'm too awesome to die! And speaking of awesomeness, I want to be able to get headshots all the time and smash people's skulls all the time. I don't want to walk for a half an hour journey to the mountain to fight the dragon; it should be a hundred feet away at the most. I want this! I want that! Gimme!" ...
They missed the point.
The twenty hour long game...it was a build up. It was a build up to a climax. You don't need constant awesome battles all the time to have an awesome game. The twenty hour long build up was enrich the climax. And alot of people thought it was well worth the wait. If you played a 50 hour long story with mostly talking and you just wanted action, you obviously bought the wrong game. It was a drama. An immersive drama. Some people like dramas. Dramas don't have shooting all day long. Shooting all day long is an action game. If you don't want to lose, play easy mode. If there is no easy mode, use cheats. If you can't, or you won't use either, your playing the wrong game too. The point of possibly losing is that there is tension - your not invincible. You can die. You can fail. Success not guaranteed makes for an interesting story. And headshots are not owed to you. They are earned. Earned with skill. Develop that skill or don't get headshots. If you want 24/hour awesomoness, you should've bought CoD. If you can't endure a journey that the developer spent hundreds of hours refining that was supposed to meaningful, all because you just want instant action, your in the wrong game. Need I continue?
But these bro gamers...they whined. They complained. The succeeded. They succeeded in goading the developers to their whims. At our expense.
The devs, or publishers, or whoever is in charge of running development of the game (Fact: Developers don't necessarily get a final say in what's in their game), couldn't discern their audience. They couldn't discern their goal. The goal was to make a game that would work like this and would be sold to these people. But the devs couldn't see; they thought that the way to make their game better was to make everybody happy. They had to change X feature to work according to their complaints. They had to delete Y feature to make it simpler. They. Gave. In.
Change isn't necessarily bad. Change can be good. But here, change was made to make it appealing to everyone, not to make the game better.
And now, here we are.
What happens when you give in? LFR happens. WoW used to be great (And is still great). But it was warped to cater to those who couldn't take the time to read a short guide on how to be better; to those who couldn't even watch a 5 minute strategy video but had hours to right up and whine about their complaints. What happens when you give in? CoD. CoD was great. It had skill. There was a time when you played CoD for a highly realistic, skill based WWII simulation. Now all it is a game of "Who can aim their target reticle the fastest". What happens when you give in? Skyrim. There used to be planning involved in developing your character. Before you started an ES character, you planned out all his skills. You gave thought to it, and when you selected his skills and created the char, you committed yourself to that line of skills. And you had to actually walk to places. You had to actually journey to those places. But now, it's just a 5 minute run up the mountain to slay the dragon.
We live in a new age my friends. The age of LAZINESS!
The devs catered to them. They loved it. They became used to it. They expect it. To those misguided bro gamers I speak of; ideas such as the risk of losing is alien to them.
They are sitting down at their tables, talking about all the glorious heads the broke today over the internet, how they never died and so on. Then they look over across the aisle, and see our table. The see us talking about how we made this decision to comfort a friend NPC, and this other NPC died for it, and why we feel guilty about it. We talk about how we got millions of souls, ran with them to the vendor, and then was stomped on by a dragon, and lost all those souls. We talk about spending months at a time developing a character - not just his skills, but developing him, his personality, who he is for the next RP event outside the orc city online. We talk about how we got the boss down to less than 1% on heroic, then the tanks became overcome, and we all wiped.
And they are amazed.
To them, the idea of actually losing in a video game, or having to do something difficult, is unfathomable. Just in the same way trying to aim a gun with a console controller is unfathomable to us. And they are disgusted. Not because there is anything actually wrong with losing, because there isn't. They are disgusted because they heard us enjoying losing. They hear that tone in our voice...the sorrow of making that fateful decision which caused that NPC to be killed. But they enjoyed the game thoroughly anyways, and the loved the game because of it. They see us enjoying losing millions of hard earned souls because of it.
And they look back towards their games, and see how empty their enjoyment with the games truly is. There was no threat. There was no risk of loss. There was no challenge.
So they try to come over to our games, and try to fit in. But sometimes...they can't. They keep dying and losing all their souls to the dragon, and they scream NERF! They play half way through the RPG, and they don't like the skills they committed to, and they say "I'd like you to please removed the entire planning process of our skills and just make the next game in series so that we can switch skills any time we like." Then the game gets dumbed down to a challengeless existence, they see another risky game, and they go to that, and so on.
But we can stop it.
We just have to affirm the devs that saying "No" isn't a crime. Because saying "No" isn't a crime. We need to guide them back, tell them that we are their customers. We are the people they spend 60 hour work weeks trying to please, trying to deliver a product that will make us happy.
And we can try to convert the casuals too. We can tell them of all the wonderful feelings that come with the risk of losing. Sure, some people honestly don't want to play our games. Some of us don't want to play theirs either. But to the gamers who do want to try out our games, we must tell them the truth: that the game is going to work like this, and if you don't like it, don't play it. Because the game is going to remain that way. But if they can see the game for what it is, they can like it. And they can appreciate it like us.
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So - I'm not going to do a TL;DR, because I don't respect people who didn't read everything that I had to say. Yes, I sound like an idiot, and I know that most of you right now didn't even read my OP because you were too busy retorting my opening statements. But to those who did read, I thank you. And I'd like to hear your thoughts as well. Come one! I don't bite. We might disagree, but I will listen.
And now, I will l receive everyone else's blatantly nasty and snide remarks about my rant. May the flaming begin!