1) Pandemic and The Doctors
While most of this was just a very straight forward, informative answer, Pachter should get a medal for the ending of this question. I always, always hate it when gamers forget that there are real people working behind these games, creative people who do get joy out of entertaining other people. As a game designer, it’s why I make games and I could relate to everything Pachter said to describe the doctors. So when you can put it into the perspective that the whiners, those people who find every little unsatisfactory element in a video game and blow it out of proportion, they potentially ruin all future installments of the things they love. I may not have played Mass Effect or any of the games in that series, but I sure as hell loved Metroid: Other M. I think the sexism comments were blown out of proportions, I think the attacks on Samus’ character are not only evidence of people ignoring the actual story but also a sign that gamers don’t care about interesting characters or well-developed stories, and Nintendo has stated that they have no idea how Other M could have been so panned. I doubt we’ll be getting another Metroid game soon, and I am mad at everyone who ruined that for me.
2) To Re-master or Not to Re-master
It’s a simple supply and demand thing. Of course, the good thing about the Halo anniversary edition was that it came with a new look, new content, and acted as like a teaser for Halo 4. I know I’ve mentioned Metroid Prime Trilogy before when talking about good reasons for re-master or re-selling of a game. Sony’s collections though are the only ones I have a problem with since they don’t have much of an excuse. They pretty up some games and sell them as a collection, but I don’t recall them offering much of anything new. Sega is kind of the same way, with how Sonic Adventure 2 was just released in HD. It doesn’t look any different and the stuff from the GCN port cost extra as DLC.
1 comment
Drew A.
October 12, 2012 at 10:16 PM (UTC -7) Link to this comment
As for the Doctors, I have to say I thought about this a lot when all the Mass Effect whining went on. I genuinly thought that was the end of future great Mass Effect games or similar games. Gamers did a lot of the same thing with Dragon Age 2, which, personally, I found to be a pretty good game. Definitely not in the same niche as Origins, but as a dungeon crawler RPG, it was one of the better ones available in 2011. But back to my original point, I think that the fan outrage over creative changes to game really hurt developers more so than help them. With Dragon Age 2, Bioware could make mistakes. They could make changes and have time to revert back to the success that was Dragon Age: Origins. They did the same with Mass Effect, where Mass Effect shifted from an RPG in the action genre to a dedicated Third Person Shooter with RPG elements and mechanics. That was a big shift, but it was worth it in the end. They did the same with Dragon Age 2, but ti didn’t pay off nearly as much, even though Dragon Age 2 sold just half of the units Origins sold, EA (and by association, Bioware) lost many sales from people who would legitimately enjoy the game, but didn’t buy it due to the overly exaggerated hate the game recieved. As Pachter said, the ME3 Ending Cataclysm was probably the straw that essentially broke The Doctor’s backs. Or made game developing not fun. Cause if your product is destroyed by the people who supposedly are fans of your products, not only is it discouraging to you personally, but these people are causing the developer to lose potential reinvestment income for future projects from publishers who think consumers are turned off by your recent creative progress and from people who hear all of the commotion and steer away from a product they would otherwise enjoy. Fan butthurt is probably the least productive means for any consumer to express that a developer isn’t doing something right (and even then, fan butthurt over meaningless things doesn’t accomplish anything at all. Bioware even diverted resources from future DLC content to revise an ending that wasn’t terrible to begin with, which put their progress on future projects back by who knows how long).