The Next-Gen could be awesome if...

       I slammed modern gaming rather harshly in my last post. I stand by my statements mind you but, I do feel that there are still some great gaming experiences in both single and multiplayer games to be had in the next generation of consoles. The Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 are capable of of more processing power than their predecessors but game developers will undoubtedly us this to enhance graphics and sound. Yes, being able to count the numbers of zits on my characters' face is novel and that epic score has to assault your ears as bullets whiz by to convey the sense of battlefield urgency but, if your story is weak, your basic controls are broken, your premise has been done a hundred times before, or the whole game is just not fun to play all that work is wasted as your game is regulated to bargain bins and clearance shelves. With the new data storage and faster processing of the Xbox One and the PS4, the focus should shift away from uber-realistic graphics to making games load faster, play smoother, and try new exciting things that just were not possible on the current-gen options.

 A quick rundown of the Xbox 360, X1 and PS4

       I stated in my last post that I plan on not buying either of the next- gen consoles. I was not being entirely truthful. As a gamer there are some ideas in gaming that I would love to see realized in both single and multiplayer titles. Single player games could benefit from larger worlds, better combat and more content while mulitplayer games could see more weapons, new mechanics and, if the servers can handle it, more players in one game. These "Game Changers" are the only caveats to the end of my gaming career. That said I am a gamer, meaning I buy consoles primarily for gaming and the extra stuff is just gravy (albeit nasty, chunky gravy in Microsoft's case). So any game that will convince me to shell out nearly $600 for a box had better live up to it's promises (I'm looking at you, Molyneux) and deliver an incredible experience that I can walk away from thinking "Now THAT was awesome!"
       Now I'm not saying every title from this point on has to be a triple-A blockbuster or even have some weird, unimaginable feature we've yet to see but, if you want your players to support your work, giving them the same, rehashed game in a different package isn't good enough anymore. Whenever new gaming consoles launch you have to give developers time to learn the technology and see exactly how far they can go. However these "tech demos" often have a few glaring deficiencies.

The ridiculously easy executions are a contrast to the well done combat.

       For the Xbox One Ryse: Son of Rome offers beautiful, fluid graphics (no surprise there) and fast and furious combat that works really well for the most part. It's a solid launch title but, it may well be forgotten in the next year or so. Fighting enemies is great fun and the blood spurts from fresh wounds feels visceral but, when it comes time to deliver a killing blow to a wounded soldier you're treated like a child and given a "kill by colors" execution sequence. The battle slows to a crawl 300 style and your intended target glows a certain color. Pressing the corresponding buttons unleashes a brutal finishing move that awards players with experience and health. Not pressing the corresponding button unleashes a brutal finishing move that awards players with slightly less experience and health. Failing the sequence has literally no consequence. They don't regain portions of their health and keep fighting or counter your attack and harm you. They just die and give a few points less. Barring that almost insulting mechanic, Ryse is a decent game but, not a system seller.

The City of Vetka

       PlayStation 4 owners were given the well done Killzone: Shadow Fall. Visuals impress (how amazing...) and the FPS game play is tight and intuitive. It does tweak some of the multiplayer mainstays and adds a nice feature known as the OWL via the touch pad but, there's no denying it's a by the numbers first person shooter. The city of Vetka is a great setting for firefights and is a showcase for what the PS4 can do graphically. As far as game play..it's a shooter. The OWL drone adds some strategic options, sending it to attack opens the enemy up to flanking for instance, but it's a futuristic FPS, nothing we haven't seen before. A decent launch title but I don't see myself running out and buying a PS4 just for this.

       So far none of the next-gen offerings are pushing the envelope but, there are some upcoming projects that take advantage of the new capabilities of the next-gen consoles to do more than make games prettier. Bungies' Destiny is turning out to be a huge IP for the both the next-gen and current-gen consoles. "We're trying to build a game that we have wanted to play that doesn't exist," Jason Jones the design director and I lit up when I read that sentence. That says to me "This is a man who loves gaming and wants to deliver the best experience possible." While offering both online and offline options, Destiny has a huge, multi-planet game world, customizable avatars and an interesting (from what I've read) story. However, like Killzone Shadow Fall, it is a shooter at heart though I am excited to see how the FPS play style can work in an MMO setting. Even though Destiny will be released on Xbox 360, X1, PS3 and PS4 it's going to be advantageous to play on the newer consoles I'd wager.

There might still be hope for the Kinect...maybe...

      Something that made me laugh and cringe was Fighter Within, a Kinect required title for the X1. It was stiff and choppy at times and outright broken at others. The characters were forgettable and the arenas were so generic I swear the developers just took pictures out of magazines and rendered them in 3D. So what am I even mentioning this mistake of a game in the same article as Destiny?

      Because I saw the potential that was wasted here.

      Since the Kinect's inception someone, somewhere thought it would be awesome to have a martial arts game that read and copied your movements exactly and, in theory, it does sound awesome. To date no one, not one game of this type, has gotten it right. I still have faith that maybe a breakthrough title that will read your movements and relay them to your in game avatar, not as pre-scripted moves but, actual mimicry of your own body, is down the road somewhere. Have your targets react to your every move and give them dynamic AI, forcing you to change up your tactics for each warrior. It could be a incredible experience and I would definitely walk away and say "That was awesome!"

       As we move into the next generation of gaming, I worry about the numerous Call of Duty clones and generic rpg's that could flood the market. Today there are so many options to choose from that the casual gamer is going to play whats popular and then move on to the next big thing, while gamers who truly love the medium will be more learned and know what specifically to look for in their preferred gaming experience. This should create a need for developers to market to the core gamers as their reviews on YouTube and various blog (like this one) and Vlogs aren't regulated by a magazine or by paid in any way. They will deliver the hard facts as a consumer, not an inside agent of the industry. These guys are who gamers, casual and core, listen to. Look at PewDiePie, Angry Joe or Smosh games. Gamers respect their opinions. Their reviews and “Let's Plays” generate sales for the titles in their respective videos. Wouldn't it stand to reason that creating something new, something that reshapes the gaming landscape or at least improves upon what is there by adding features that were unattainable before, is in developers best interests? The reviews would be glowing if the titles are crafted with the prospective gamer in mind and not the end result profit. There's nothing wrong with a good staple game but they're so trite at this point. Gamers would like to play something that features something more than guns, sorcery and swords.

My gaming career may be coming to an end.

     

     Yeah, this was a thing.

        I've been a gamer since I was four years old. The first time I ever played a video game was at my grandmother's house. My two cousins, Darrell and Jovan, lived with her and Jovan's mother had bought him an NES. My brother Jason and I spent hours playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Super Mario brothers whenever we went to visit. I'm not sure if it was the magic of controlling something on a T.V. screen or just that I idolized my two cousins and wanted to emulate them in any way I could but, after enough whining and begging, my father soon presented me with a Nintendo of my own one Christmas morning. Castlevaina, Air Fortress, Bayou Billy and Ghostbusters were the first games I ever owned. All around the neighborhood my friends also received new games for their respective holidays and soon we all came together to compare which games were best. This trend would continue from 1989 until November 22, 2005: the release date of the Xbox 360. That was the day that console gaming changed forever.

        Gamer profiles, Gamerscore and Achievements were all great ideas. Having tangible feedback and proof of a particular achievement won over gamers like me who had purchased Performance brand memory cards due to multiple units stored in each card (I can't even find my N64 memory unit and I'm more than a little upset about that) who were ecstatic to finally be rid of them. Often we had to keep the data of a particular game, taking up valuable and scare space on our memory cards, to prove to our friends that we had reached a certain level or beaten a certain game. To this day my older brother still doesn't believe I found the Knights of the Round Materia in Final Fantasy VII. Having separate profiles solved an age old problem of other people erasing your game saves to make room for theirs or worse having them play your data and making an irreversible error. Now multiple gamers in one household ( I lived with four other gamers, including my mom) could share one console and not worry about game crossing as long as there is enough space on the hard drive. Gamerscore allowed you to compare you gaming progress to other gamers in your circle, not to mention all over the world. Gamers were sharing and comparing feats more than ever before. The model was so successful that Sony followed suit and engineered the PSP interface for the PS3 adding the gamer score and trophy elements. Graphics and sound had improved beyond imagining and the advantage that PC gamers held over console gamers slowly began to dissipate.

Ah the "Xbone"

        Until May 2013: The Xbox ONE reveal.

        The Microsoft Xbox One was a guaranteed buy for me until I watched the reveal and heard the aftermath. 24-hour DRM, television and movie centric applications, mandatory game installation, constant Kinect 2 and the main point of issue-paying a fee for used games. I couldn't believe it so I researched the information and had my heart broken as I found the rumors were indeed true. Microsoft had, in one fell swoop, eviscerated everything I loved about my favorite hobby. Gamers who had been faithful the Xbox brand were outraged and demanded the entire structure be changed, some even going so far as abandon their pre-orders in favor of the much more gamer-focused PlayStation 4. In response Microsoft changed it's policies to pacify it's angry consumers. Many gamers then breathed a sigh of relief, went back to their local GameStop and re-preordered the Xbox One.

        But some, like me, did not.

        Microsoft gave me a glimpse at what gaming is going to be in the corporate future. Privatized entertainment nodes that do everything from being a cable box to a Skype replacement. I was going to buy an Xbox One to play video games. Video. Games. If I want to watch television I will turn off my Xbox and watch cable like everyone else. I am among the minority that doesn't even like football so the NFL/Xbox partnership is lost on me and I will never feel comfortable with my Kinect always watching me. My wife and I do things in our living room we don't want Microsoft watching. The 24-hour DRM just feels like a form of control. I took serious offense when I heard about this feature. It's like Microsoft was saying " Have fun but only when we say so. Don't check in with us every day and that nice black console you paid $600 for becomes a useless brick." Imagine having to send an email to Ford every time you started your car or having to call Pepsi every time you opened a soda! Even worse, if you log onto your profile on someone else's console you can only play for one hour! These days that's barely enough to cover the training missions. That's just the consoles, the games themselves are even worse.

 Am I the only one who would love an Elder Scrolls with the character development and equipment options of Morrowind with the combat and graphics of Skyrim?

        I must reach into the internet archives and regurgitate an argument that I've heard often, but never wanted to be a part of : Core gamers are being forgotten. I straddled the fence in this argument although I really began to see it's significance with Fable 2, The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim, Mass Effect 2 & 3, Resident Evil 6, Saints Row the Third and, the ultimate frat-boy middle finger to those of us who grew up in the era of Doom and Wolfenstein, Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 3 and now Ghosts. Dumbed down to appeal to anyone with a pulse, these games, while having their good points, left a sour taste in core gamers mouths. Think about eating cold pizza, it's as gross as it is delicious but if it were in it's intended form (hot and fresh) it would be perfect. Note that every title named above is a sequel or future entry. The parent titles still hold a place in my heart as some of the best games I've ever played but then companies try to go for mass appeal and end up burning the very people who made their product such a hot seller in the first place. Major key elements are removed and replaced with Idiot Systems (Resident Evils' run-and-gun gameplay, Mass Effects' focus on gunplay and downplay of the RPG elements, Skyrim's "perk" system, etc) to make the game accessible to everyone. Here's what developers aren't getting; not everyone wants to play video games! There is no entertainment medium with such an overwhelming blanket effect of satisfaction that no one can resist it. I understand marketing to as many customers as possible but, the casual gamers will do exactly what you don't want them to and buy your game used at a reduced price because gaming isn't a hobby for them. It's just a passing fancy before they go back to their X-Factor, Candy Crush and vampire movie fixations. You can not entice someone into playing your game just because of the pretty graphics and how easy it is to pick up and play if they aren't truly interested in the media, especially not at the expense of the people who do want your game but don't want either of the aforementioned factors to be where all the effort was placed.

 How game publishers think we see them.

 How we actually see them.

        I know that gaming is a business and that businesses are after profit but I fail to see how ignoring and alienating your prime demographic is good business. In the last year I've seen more gamers leave console gaming and turn to PC gaming, dissatisfied with the way they have been pushed to the wayside for casual gamers who couldn't care less about the time, talent and resources that went into the process, then the 5 years prior. Catering to the casual gamer will not turn them into a core gamer (and if it does they will become as jaded with current gen gaming as many of us are now) but it will earn you profit until the next new fad comes along and they abandon your console in favor of the new, shiny Galaxy S12 or whatever new tech will be available.

        I am a core gamer and have been for well over twenty years. I've played every home console from Atari 2600 to PlayStation 3. I would go to the local grocery store and slam a quarter on the Street Fighter 2 machine challenging the winner of the current bout. I have waited in line at a Midnight release and walked 3 miles home afterward as my hometown shuts down the transit system after 11:00 pm. I have been a dedicated gamer, but this will be my last generation of gaming. I refuse to purchase an Xbox One or a PlayStation 4 knowing whats coming further down the line. It's all downhill for gaming from here and I am getting of this ride before it crashes.