Buyers Remorse Hitting Champions Online Players
I tried to warn you, I really did. When I tore Champions Online a new a-hole for sucking in every conceivable way except character customization (apparently the only aspect of design Cryptic can do successfully any more), you all called me names and insisted it was a stunt to increase traffic. Now, several months after release, players are discovering that I was right, evidenced by this nifty editorial from MMOCrunch titled, quite simply, “Why I Quit Champions Online”.
Plan and simple, Champions Online lost its hold on me. I continued to dive into the game, move around the world, soak up the atmosphere, read about its future and most importantly, evaluate the content beyond my reach. What I definitively learned, and I hope my review hinted at, is that the game lacks legs. The atmosphere has always been incredibly disjointed thanks to the instancing of most zones. Even though all of the settings make sense in the universe, they lack a cohesive flow. And the multitude of characters aren’t employed effectively either. Because of these continued slip-ups through the middle to later levels, Champions Online gets boiled down to its diverse arcade-y combat. In essence, it becomes a soulless experience.
When I tore Star Trek Online a new a-hole for the very same reasons, I was once again called every name in the book and, like Champions Online, it will take a few months before I am once again proven correct. I’m trying to save you people money, I swear. I die a little inside every time I hear someone has foolishly purchased a lifetime subscription.
The Many Failures of Mass Effect 2
One of our writers posted a critique of the latest wildly-popular BioWare RPG, Mass Effect 2, on our sister site, InfoAddict, and it’s seriously stirred up the emotions of quite a few fanboys so we thought we’d reprint it here for you to enjoy (or hate) too. (If you’d like to read some of the encouraging comments and fiery criticisms left on the original post, you can find it here.)
With an average score of 96 on Metacritic, one would be justified in believing Mass Effect 2 has little room for improvement. An overwhelming majority of so-called game critics have weighed-in, predictably showering Bioware’s latest RPG with roses and garlands.
Bioware is one of a select number of game companies that receives a +3 modifier in review scores. So take an average game that would normally receive a 7, add Bioware’s name to the box, and oila! Instant 10. While this may be great for Bioware’s bottom-line, it’s actually a grave disservice to the company and gamers, not to mention a glowing example of everything that is wrong in game journalism; criticism specifically.
Having played and finished Mass Effect 2, I can safely say, without reservation or hesitation, that Bioware’s latest RPG is a complete mess, from top-to-bottom and not a product worthy of Bioware’s heritage.
Before I launch my critiques, allow me to post a comment from Bioware’s very own Ray Muzyka that appeared in a recent interview given to Computer & Video Games:
Early feedback and reviews for Mass Effect 2 have been hugely positive. You must be delighted?
We look at it really practically. We’ve had a lot of 90-rated games right? Pretty much every game we’ve ever released has been 90-plus. So we take it in our stride. We kind of look at it that sometimes our teams are our worst critics in terms of the way they look at our past work.
While we’re really ecstatic about the feedback we also look at it and say ‘Where are the opportunities for improvement? How do we make the next installment in this trilogy better? How do we make the next installment of Dragon Age better? How do we make Star Wars: The Old Republic better?’ I look more to the future than to the past.
It’s interesting being at the EA meetings and receiving the launch congratulations. I appreciate it and it’s nice to receive nice words and congratulations, but I’m more interested in how we drive success in the future, how we make our next games even better than Mass Effect.
Well Ray, if you want to know how to improve your franchise then I highly recommend you don’t read any actual reviews, because my brethren in the journalism community are rabid fanboys who unfortunately have bylines. You also won’t find much at Metacritic because they de-list any site that has review scores that are not within some arbitrary average, which defeats the entire purpose of aggregate reviews when you remove low scores.
So Ray, that leaves you and me…and few lonely stragglers shouted down in forum posts. Besides, the public has spoken with their wallets: they love Mass Effect 2. Then again, people love the Transformers movies. There is no accounting for taste, but there is bookkeeping when it comes to quality.
Enough preamble.
Mako Gone = Great, Planet Survey = Bad
One of the many aspects of the original Mass Effect I despised was the awful Mako, an ATV the player drove to explore planets. The problem was the physics behind the Mako, which made it feel like a lame arcade game with all of its bouncing around and assorted nonsense. Bioware obviously heard people’s criticism but instead of fixing the issue they simply removed the feature altogether. Unfortunately, their overall solution is to have the player survey planets from the Normandy, a truly boring and repetitive process that involves holding the mouse button down as you scan the surface of a planet for minerals. This is presented in such a boring and uninteresting way that it comes across as a huge speed bump for the game, a necessary evil imposed on the player because you need those resources to create new upgrades.
Mass Effect 3 Improvement: Make surveying a planet challenging and truly interactive. Make it an experience. Develop an economic model that powers the entire enterprise, have the player fight off enemies for resources, invest in mines and factories. There are a lot of ways to handle this besides looking at a boring planet display and hovering your mouse over the surface. This concept wouldn’t pass muster as a free iPhone app.
The British Romans Effect
Mass Effect 2 places you within a bustling galaxy packed with many alien species and cultures. Unfortunately, they all speak English and have human mannerisms. They are alien in look only, which is quite lazy on the part of the designers. Perhaps Bioware believes people can’t stomach subtitles or have low reading comprehension. Whatever their reasoning, Mass Effect 2 reminds me of several TV shows recently, like Rome and the new Spartacus, wherein all the Romans have a British accent because the production company in question is British. At least when George Lucas made Star Wars, his aliens sounded and behaved like aliens, complete with subtitles. No one complained and it made the universe feel like it had aliens with tangible cultures. When George made the second trilogy, he drifted away from alien languages and we were left with Jar Jar Binks.
Mass Effect 3 Improvement: Develop alien languages for at least a few major species so your game doesn’t feel so culturally and racially vacant.
Gran Turismo PSP Crashes and Burns With Critics
Early reviews of the forthcoming Gran Turismo for PSP are not kind, which can’t be music to the ears of Sony, who is hoping the franchise will breath life into PSP sales. Not all reviews are bad, but the good one comes from what I call “shill-sites”, i.e., game websites who love just about everything so they can keep getting free swag and better relations with PR firms. It’s the big boys who are hating on Gran Turismo, sites like CVG, Eurogamer and IGN.
‘relying on players to make their own fun is either lazy or foolhardy. Coupled with archaic AI and the isolating absence of PlayStation Network support, this makes for a game that feels unfocused and regressive, despite its considerable technical and mechanical accomplishments.’
‘For a lot of other Gran Turismo fans, the fantastic driving is coupled with starting out at the bottom, slowly tweaking and upgrading your starter car as you compete in event after event, and gradually buying new rides to take on bigger and better challenges. And then eventually, after lots of hard work, you’ll get a car that can crack the 200mph barrier and you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something great. Gran Turismo on the PSP contains none of this, and by and large, that’s the entire problem.’
Superb car handling is the only redeeming factor for GT PSP. It feels great to drive. But that driving needed to be packaged with an actual racing game and that game isn’t here.
Battlefield 1943: If It’s Broke, Fix It!
(This feature can also be read on InfoAddict.)
Battlefield 1943 blew the doors off the XBLA Marketplace, selling a mammoth 600,000 copies in just three days to become the fastest selling arcade game in the platform’s history. It’s a well-deserved success for a truly awesome game that finds me returning night after night for my fix.
Unfortunately, not all is well in the world of Battlefield as a few glaring problems are increasingly annoying the shit out of me. Worse, EA/DICE aren’t copping to any issues and are acting like too many other game companies by simply burying their head in the sand while they count your money.
So what needs fixing? Here goes…
Fix the Squad System
I play Battlefield 1943 every night with my brother as a two-man squad. At the end of nearly every round, our squad is disbanded and we find ourselves on opposite sides. We can only reform our squad if there happens to be an available slot on either side, which is seldom the case.
That means we have to exit the round, go back to the main menu, reform our squad and search for yet another game, only to repeat that process over and over and over.
It’s frustrating, ridiculous and it needs to be addressed.
This situation most likely occurs because the auto-balancing system is trumping the squad party, which is not the way it should work.
Fix the Squad System Part II
DICE made a huge error in making squads an option and not mandatory. Joining a squad is a benefit to every player as it gives you up to three more options on where to spawn after a death. Without a squad, you are stuck spawning on the carrier or a captured flag. When you’re in a squad, you can spawn next to any squad member, affording you access to current skirmishes and flag attacks that happen to be underway.
Battlefield 1943 should force players into a squad from the get-go. No option to go solo. The entire game is based upon squad play, yet for some reason DICE lets people go lone-wolf, which is pretty stupid.
Obviously, players could solve this problem by joining a squad, but considering your average player is a complete moron, I’d rather not sit around waiting for the community to solve an issue that shouldn’t be an issue. I back my “moron” claim because more often than not, when I click Join an Open Squad….I don’t actually join an active squad because THERE ARE NO SQUADS TO JOIN. That means there are 11 people on my team acting like a solo-tard.
Fix the Matchmaking
Not as prevalent as the relentless Squad Disbanding bug but no less annoying is Battlefield 1943’s weak matchmaking service that find me entering a round with only a handful of players on the server. Playing 4 versus 4 is not uncommon, nor is it any fun.
Battlefield 1943 is meant to be played 12 versus 12. Period. 10 versus 10 should be the threshold before the server is restarted and repopulated. Why games that are populated with only 8 total people are allowed to exist is beyond me. It makes for a thoroughly boring experience, forcing the player to bail on the round and return to the main menu, hoping the next round will actually be populated with players.
This wouldn’t be so bad if nearly empty games were injected with players to fill the server, but that rarely happens, indicating there is a bug in DICE’s system that needs to be addressed.
Nintendo Is Van Halen
History repeats itself time and time again. But repetition is by no means limited to the same medium.
As we progress deeper into the first full year since the backlash over Nintendo’s E3 2008 showing, and the continuing trend of terms such as “hardcore” and “casual” ripple through gaming journalism, I can’t help but remember some history from a little rock band called Van Halen. (Maybe you’ve heard of them?)
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that the Big N has a lot in common with what some consider the progenitor of 80s hair bands.
Both Van Halen and Nintendo got their start in their current industries (music and video games, respectively) in approximately the mid-to-late 1970s. Both became famous around the mid-1980s and each group had its easily recognizable trademarks. For Van Halen it was wild finger-tapping guitar style of Eddie Van Halen as well as the onstage anctics of frontman David Lee Roth. For Nintendo it was the addicting and enjoyable creations of Shigeru Miyamoto as well as the lesser-known strategic business planning of former NOA president Minoru Arakawa.
But more importantly, both groups suffered from a severe backlash by the self-described “hardcore” crowd upon a sudden change in creative direction that expanded their markets. However, unlike the previous similarities I point out, the referenced backlash to both Van Halen and Nintendo occurred almost exactly 20 years apart from each other. It’s a two-decade gap that makes the recurrence so intriguing. Neither backlash of the hardcore is entirely unique. In fact, the similarities are quite astounding.
Van Halen had built quite an underground following between the years of 1978 and 1983. The group and its five studio albums were well established within the rock community, but they still failed to achieve mass marketing penetration.
In 1984 the group released its mega-hit album, 1984, which peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts, right behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The lead song from the 1984 album, “Jump,” rocketed Van Halen to stardom along with other songs such as “Panama,” “I’ll Wait,” and “Hot For Teacher.”
Battlefield 1943: If It’s Broke, Fix It!
(This feature can also be read on InfoAddict.)
Battlefield 1943 blew the doors off the XBLA Marketplace, selling a mammoth 600,000 copies in just three days to become the fastest selling arcade game in the platform’s history. It’s a well-deserved success for a truly awesome game that finds me returning night after night for my fix.
Unfortunately, not all is well in the world of Battlefield as a few glaring problems are increasingly annoying the shit out of me. Worse, EA/DICE aren’t copping to any issues and are acting like too many other game companies by simply burying their head in the sand while they count your money.
So what needs fixing? Here goes…
Fix the Squad System
I play Battlefield 1943 every night with my brother as a two-man squad. At the end of nearly every round, our squad is disbanded and we find ourselves on opposite sides. We can only reform our squad if there happens to be an available slot on either side, which is seldom the case.
That means we have to exit the round, go back to the main menu, reform our squad and search for yet another game, only to repeat that process over and over and over.
It’s frustrating, ridiculous and it needs to be addressed.
This situation most likely occurs because the auto-balancing system is trumping the squad party, which is not the way it should work.
Fix the Squad System Part II
DICE made a huge error in making squads an option and not mandatory. Joining a squad is a benefit to every player as it gives you up to three more options on where to spawn after a death. Without a squad, you are stuck spawning on the carrier or a captured flag. When you’re in a squad, you can spawn next to any squad member, affording you access to current skirmishes and flag attacks that happen to be underway.
Battlefield 1943 should force players into a squad from the get-go. No option to go solo. The entire game is based upon squad play, yet for some reason DICE lets people go lone-wolf, which is pretty stupid.
Obviously, players could solve this problem by joining a squad, but considering your average player is a complete moron, I’d rather not sit around waiting for the community to solve an issue that shouldn’t be an issue. I back my “moron” claim because more often than not, when I click Join an Open Squad….I don’t actually join an active squad because THERE ARE NO SQUADS TO JOIN. That means there are 11 people on my team acting like a solo-tard.
Fix the Matchmaking
Not as prevalent as the relentless Squad Disbanding bug but no less annoying is Battlefield 1943’s weak matchmaking service that find me entering a round with only a handful of players on the server. Playing 4 versus 4 is not uncommon, nor is it any fun.
Battlefield 1943 is meant to be played 12 versus 12. Period. 10 versus 10 should be the threshold before the server is restarted and repopulated. Why games that are populated with only 8 total people are allowed to exist is beyond me. It makes for a thoroughly boring experience, forcing the player to bail on the round and return to the main menu, hoping the next round will actually be populated with players.
This wouldn’t be so bad if nearly empty games were injected with players to fill the server, but that rarely happens, indicating there is a bug in DICE’s system that needs to be addressed.
Nintendo Is Van Halen
History repeats itself time and time again. But repetition is by no means limited to the same medium.
As we progress deeper into the first full year since the backlash over Nintendo’s E3 2008 showing, and the continuing trend of terms such as “hardcore” and “casual” ripple through gaming journalism, I can’t help but remember some history from a little rock band called Van Halen. (Maybe you’ve heard of them?)
And the more I think about it, the more I realize that the Big N has a lot in common with what some consider the progenitor of 80s hair bands.
Both Van Halen and Nintendo got their start in their current industries (music and video games, respectively) in approximately the mid-to-late 1970s. Both became famous around the mid-1980s and each group had its easily recognizable trademarks. For Van Halen it was wild finger-tapping guitar style of Eddie Van Halen as well as the onstage anctics of frontman David Lee Roth. For Nintendo it was the addicting and enjoyable creations of Shigeru Miyamoto as well as the lesser-known strategic business planning of former NOA president Minoru Arakawa.
But more importantly, both groups suffered from a severe backlash by the self-described “hardcore” crowd upon a sudden change in creative direction that expanded their markets. However, unlike the previous similarities I point out, the referenced backlash to both Van Halen and Nintendo occurred almost exactly 20 years apart from each other. It’s a two-decade gap that makes the recurrence so intriguing. Neither backlash of the hardcore is entirely unique. In fact, the similarities are quite astounding.
Van Halen had built quite an underground following between the years of 1978 and 1983. The group and its five studio albums were well established within the rock community, but they still failed to achieve mass marketing penetration.
In 1984 the group released its mega-hit album, 1984, which peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts, right behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The lead song from the 1984 album, “Jump,” rocketed Van Halen to stardom along with other songs such as “Panama,” “I’ll Wait,” and “Hot For Teacher.”
Top 10 Best Selling Games
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