As gaming season approaches in December, and we’re ready to empty our wallets, close the blinds, and grind out hours upon hours, I want to address the state of the gaming industry. Especially taking shots at the white collars who have turned gaming from a mutual relationship to a parasitic one.

For the last two years cosumers of the gaming industry have been bombarded with not even bad games, but broken, un-optimized, unfinished, and manipulative games. This kind of behavior shouldn’t be tolerated, yet some gamers continue to support these developers with their wallets.

It all started with Destiny (Bungie and Activision 2014). Destiny is not a bad game. It’s actually pretty awesome. The first person shooter combined with sci-fi elements makes the game a fast paced battle royal. However there are so many problems with the game.

The loot system is sure to rage as you can grind for literally weeks for one Exotic or Legendary drop item you want, and never get it, yet the guy at the bottom of the scoreboard who did the worst when you guys enter The Crucible, game mode, gets that item. However the game is fun until you want more than what you’re tired of.

Aside from the backtracking and petty micro-transactions, the biggest problem Destiny faces is their Downloadable Content. You must purchase DLC which is like the next part of the game to continue the campaign. Metaphorically, games should follow the formula of giving you the whole burger, with fries and a drink as DLC, but Destiny starts you off with the bottom bun, and up to the top bun is DLC—the meat, lettuce, tomato, cheese, all of it. A marketing strategy as such is unacceptable really, as it rips off consumers.

Next is Fallout 4 (Bethesda 2015). This game came out incredibly broken, buggy, and glitchy. While some were funny, others froze or crashed the game. Developers should have spent more time implementing their emergency updates to the game, I don’t know, maybe before they released it?

Then there is Star Wars Battlefront (EA DICE, Criterion Games 2015), the greatest disappointment to a Star Wars fan. A combination of amazing graphics and competitive gameplay made the game great. Though there were not as many maps as other Battlefront games, it was ok because of how the game was designed for everyone, young and old to play. And those graphics. Seriously, the game is ridiculous.  What made this game a disappointment was the amount of content cut by not adding space battles, other game modes, and… no single player campaign.

No Man’s Sky take the biggest L of the decade. If you’re familiar with the game Star Citizen you know that the sci-fi game featuring centering around spaceships and galactic exploration basically did every realistic thing that developer Sean Murray lied about. I say realistic because with procedurally generated worlds, the game promised to have 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets. Yes, that is not a joke…18 quintillion roughly. It turned out to be the same plants and animals and environments, but with different colors and parts. The game advertised to be Star Citizen 2.0, but was nothing more than a broken rock mining simulator. You would mine rocks, to get a mining gun to mine more rocks.

Lastly, let’s talk about Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, or should I say Call of Duty: Infinity Recycling. Since the transition to Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, the game has been the same game, over, and over, and over again–Ghosts, Infinite Warfare, Black Ops 3. And it’s so obvious that they’re making no effort to change anything. The next company who takes the next turn will redesign the weapons, add a few new maps, and ta-dah! A new COD. The worst part is that some of the community isn’t fighting back. Most are, as the YouTube video of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare like:dislike ratio is 1:6. Still though, those people still supporting this nonsense are doing so as Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare included their most popular game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, remastered with graphical fidelity as a bonus in their $80 gold edition to use consumers’ nostalgia against them. Activision’s CEO Bobby Kotick even claimed, “There will always be Call of Duty games.”

We need our games back. We need to feel satisfied. It’s about the gamer. Producing crappy, incomplete, or buggy games is ridiculous and cheating.

 

 

Written by Nifa Kaniga

Opinion Editor