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But to totally discard the majority of games before indie-mania (except for a select few genres) seems absolutely crazy. Anyone that can't even appreciate that other approaches have merits is someone I would absolutely avoid. Are annual football releases inherently 'better' than Final Fantasy VII or Fallout 3, for example? Are those latter two games all of a sudden 'rubbish' because their scope is driven by actual narrative?
I think his approach absolutely has merits. I appreciated how Dark Souls didn't force a story upon you, but at the same time, I think it's lazy to have a story that only exists if you hunt for it. It's like the Final Fantasy VIII ghost theory or the Lavander Town pokémon theory, except as the entire basis of the entire game. A story that's not even necessarily there; something which has to be made up to be embraced? Fuck that.
I think it's great to have a game in which you can make your own story. It's part of the reason for my Football Manager obsession. But if you took away linear narrative from gaming, you would take away my favourite games. That is not something I can ever agree with."
Unfortunately, it's not just under-rated games coming under fire. It's under-rated genres. When the few mainstream publications that do review a JRPG for example say that it's generic or batshit-crazy, people believe it because there's very few telling them the truth. Same with strategies. There are a slew out there that people have never heard of and would probably love if every publication didn't have Halo 4, Black Ops 2, Medal of Honour (and every other GENERIC FPS released this year) smothered all over the front page/front cover."
I've got to question your idea of the audience, too. Are they 17-year-olds with potty mouths or are they casuals? The two groups you've identified are about as close to mutual exclusivity as it gets.
And cheap tactics? They exist in every genre. Fighters are famed for them. Football games are flooded with them. RPGs have plenty of their own. Besides, if you'd PRACTICED, or were SKILLFUL, you wouldn't fall prey to these tricks. ;) "
For as long as people use entertainment to be entertained, this will be the case, but just as film-goers have War Horse and Benjamin Button, and just as readers have The Shadow of the Wind and I Know this Much is True, gamers have an entire indie scene. They have a politically-dystopian Bioshock, they have Catherine, Lost Odyssey and even Final Fantasy VII to some extent."
So if you scroll down VGChartz' best-sellinggame database with that in mind, what do you get?
43 games. 10 are Call of Duty games. The top 5 are CoD games. 19 more are games with an annual or almost annual release system. 8 are sequels. 2 more spawned at least three sequels despite only being released this generation. And finally, there's Red Dead Redemption and LittleBigPlanet.
If something sells, publishers will sell as much as they can. It doesn't matter if they run it into the ground because they'll just jump to the next big seller and leave it to rot.
It doesn't help that 'critics' are effusive in their praise for the worst offenders. Mass Effect 2 got 96 on Metacritic. Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 got 94. Gears 2, Mass Effect 3 and Rock Band 3 got 93. Guitar Hero 2, Rock Band, Forza 3 and Rock Band 2 got 92. Super Street Fighter IV, Halo: Reach, Forza 4 and Gears 3 got 91. FIFA 12, FIFA 10, FIFA 13 and NBA 2k12 got 90. 89? AC: Brotherhood, Left 4 Dead 2, The Beatles Rock Band, NBA 2k11. 88? Modern Warfare 2, NHL 10, NHL 09, Battlefield Bad Company 2, NHL 11, NBA 2k13, FIFA 11.
The vast majority of these games barely changed a thing from their previous release, and most of them had glaring flaws that've spawned the ire of tens of thousands of internet commenters, and yet they still received almost no criticism.
The inability of critics to criticise is almost as damaging as the publishers who don't care about an IP any more than how much money it gets them."
