A beauty to behold, but shallow and empty beyond the stunning looks.

Initially, my reactions to the incredibly detailed rendition of 1940s and 50s America in Mafia II was overwhelmingly good. The game world of Empire Bay – the ersatz New York City – is stunningly beautiful to behold, the amount of little details worked into it astounding, the vistas breathtaking. The overall sense of place and sense of sheer scale of the city matched and surpassed even that of GTA IV’s Liberty City, which surely is no easy thing to do.
Empire Bay’s scale and size just felt more real and immediate, less like the image of a city shrunk to fit the sandbox playground better.

But after awhile of playing the game, the jarring flaws start to seep through the pretty canvas. First of all, the AI controlling the other cars in the game is horribly bad in reacting to the presence of a car that’s not part of it’s hive mind. Accident free driving is almost impossible, since all other drivers act like the player’s car either does not exist or as if the traffic regulations don’t apply when dealing with a not-AI controlled car. It’s a bit like the player is an unwelcome guest driving around in a grumpy old man’s model train set. This combined with a still pretty anal police AI that is quick to stop the player when witnessing a car crash, can easily lead to a lot of missions failing.

The missions themselves also are an exercise in flawed design and incredibly heavy in ludonarrative dissonance. The first non-tutorial mission involving shooting (or rather, the first mission where the player HAS to shoot at virtual people) forces the player to take down several pursuing police officers. Which, to anyone who’s followed recent Mafia themed fiction, is one of the big no-nos and usually a very big deal. Not so in this game. Shooting down cops is no big deal.
The following chase down a busy city street shows the police AI taking severe liberties in going after the player, shooting at full auto into a crowd of people.

In a game that’s obviously satirical like GTA or Saint’s Row this wouldn’t matter. The police in these games are cartoonishly incompetent to begin with, so them behaving like evil/stupid cartoon cops isn’t that big of a deal. Mafia II lends itself the air of a much more serious crime drama, so the police behaving that way seems strangely out of line. The player being forced into being a cop killer early on is a similar narrative breaker.
Things get worse of course. Only a few missions down the line the player is faced with a gang of misbehaving juveniles, who appear to be armed to the very teeth and utterly unshaken by a bunch of similarly outfitted mobsters who start gunning down their buddies.
This shooting gallery of a mission ends with a gang genocide of epic proportions, but it’s not a big deal of course. The current mob boss will “not like it”, but other than a line dropped in the end of mission cutscene, there are no further consequences to going genocide on the leather jacket wearing youngsters.

Sadly there is nothing else to do in the really outstandingly pretty and well realized game world. Driving is only fun as long as no other cars are involved (=rarely), the missions are dull at best and most of the time horribly frustrating since Mafia II pretends the latest GTA installments didn’t happen when it comes to checkpoints (and other things), throwing the player back to the start of any given mission most of the time. There is no such thing as sidequests, so all that remains of the game is a surprisingly un-fun 1950s themed model train set. A lovingly crafted and detailed one, but as model train playsets are, it remains utterly devoid of life and just too limited in interaction for a game released in 2010.
Which is a real shame, since the first Mafia game still ranks amongst my favorite “open world” games of all times.

By far not the gaming franchise with the most installments on the market, Final Fantasy's rather recent trend to put out proper sequels to it's games comes across as a bit over the top, adding arabic numbers to the regular roman ones.

Sequels are a phenomenon of popular culture. It’s something everybody loves to hate. They’re unnecessary–just another piece of proof that capitalism is destroying art in all its forms, turning it into derivative, unimaginative, uncreative, food for the masses. Carbon copies of the so-called “tried and true” ideas which a studio or publisher believes it can still get more golden eggs out of.

In spite of the abundant hatred towards sequels and “franchisation,” the angry customer often forgets that for almost every bad sequel there is also a good one. Almost. It might be true that a lot of sequels are inherently unnecessary, but even among the supposedly unnecessary ones there are some gems to be found.

There are different types of sequels.

The first kind–the most common–simply offers more of the same. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it is a bit unimaginative. Ideally, those more-of-the-same sequels manage to polish up the experience that made the original good. But that’s the ideal. Most of the time it just isn’t achieved–with the sequel attempting to pull the same tricks the original did, but failing to recreate the magic that made the original special.

The other kind–the superior–is the kind that expands on the ideas of the original and takes them in new, different directions.

Video game sequels are different from their film-based counterparts.

Uncharted 2 is regarded by many as a perfect sequel, offering just the right balance of old ideas and new innovations as well as more polished made possible by a bigger budget.

The most prominent example of this would be the “Uncharted” series, which began with a flawed, but enjoyable game which then went on to an incredibly refined and polished sequel that earned its creator Naughty Dog a bunch of Game of the Year awards in 2009.

This necessary refinement of a game concept is something that can be seen a lot in games, especially when a developer makes a game that’s outside of his comfort zone. The examples for this effect are numerous: “Mass Effect”, “Dead Space”, “Grand Theft Auto” and “Thief”. Each of these games were blessed with sequels which took their basic concepts and refined them, edging out flaws and adding levels of polish without necessarily reinventing the franchise in question from the ground up or going in entirely new directions.

The closest thing that movies have in common to games in this regard is no doubt the “X-Men” series. It’s quite visible in that the first installment didn’t have the necessary budget to go all the way to be a special effects laden movie like it should have been. Effects were skimpy and the movie looked unpolished at parts, but it was by no means a bad movie. Needless to say, with a bigger budget, it would’ve been better–as evidenced by the (direct, mind you) sequel.

And then there are other franchise installments – ones that don’t walk down the well-trodden path of the originals, but take central ideas, concepts and characters and spin them in a new direction. Sometimes this goes as far as radical re-imagining a show–“Battlestar Galactica” only had the basic concepts and names in common with the 1970s show, much to the disappointment of a lot of people including Dirk “Starbuck” Benedict. The rest was different.

The third Die Hard movie saw the return of the original's director John McTiernan, as well as a fresh take on the misadventures of John McClane.

Other times, a sequel abandons the fundamental concept of the original and go somewhere else entirely. Take “Die Hard with a Vengeance” for example. It’s a much better “Die Hard” sequel than the second movie, and that is because it abandons the core concept of having John McLane trapped in a building for something else entirely. It expands McLane as a character who lives in a world outside of the confined spaces of the first two films. “Die Hard with a Vengeance” still carries the trademark dry humor and still features the main character getting more and more bruised throughout the course of the movie. But other than that, there are few structural parallels between the first two movies. “Die Hard” movies don’t have to take place on Christmas, or feature John McLane being isolated in a building filled with armed terrorists.

The gaming parallel is a bit more obscure with this one, since gaming franchise sequels rarely leave the comfort zone of an established concept. “Far Cry 2” fits the pattern, since it’s a sequel in name only–taking only the huge, open landscapes from the first game but nothing else. A possible future title to do this would be “Bioshock Infinite”, which only retains some of the gameplay concepts of the original while abandoning the iconic underwater city for a whole new setting and a whole new cast of characters.

Developer Irrational Games decided to stick with the "Bioshock" name for their next game, despite the game being "only" a spiritual successor, abandoning the most obvious tropes of the "Bioshock" series so far.

This hope for a “Die Hard 3-like sequel” is what causes me to welcome larger thematic changes to existing franchises. “Max Payne 3” doesn’t have to take place in New York City to be a great new entry to the series; and a new “System Shock” doesn’t have to take place aboard a starship or space station, as long as some central aspects remain in place.

A good franchise is worth more than its constituent parts. With that being said, there are certain parts which can be singled out, separated from the whole and then put into a whole different context and still work as well as they did in the original product. “Bioshock” doesn’t need Rapture as it’s setting for a sequel; and Fallout works just as well with first person shooter mechanics as it did with isometric turn based strategy.

There is no reason why a new installment to a preexisting series will be lesser to its predecessors simply because it plans to leave some of its established tropes behind.

It goes without saying that hardcore fans of any series–especially that of an established franchise will be the most vocal among the crowd, raising issues where none exist. Fans will be displeased by any significant changes to the original product, especially changes to its perceived “vision”.

Ultimately, both of the ways a sequel can go will only be as good as their execution. In the right hands, any weird idea might just work. David Fincher pulled off a movie about Facebook. Christopher Nolan managed to elevate the Batman movies to a higher echelon of acclaimed Hollywood grandeur. 2K Marin did the impossible and developed a worthy and in some ways even better game with its sequel to “Bioshock”.

It’s sad to say that countless other sequels fall short of expectations, and are what most people think of “sequels”: cheap cash-ins with little to no artistic value.

In the end, it’s not the concept that matters, or how faithful a sequel stays to the original. Although those things are not unimportant, it eventually comes down to the people behind the project, and the faith of the publishers who back it.

Big thanks to Ian M. “Stillgray” Cheong for the editing job on this one.

I called the bluff. People are lying to each other big time on the Internet. And in the gaming press.
It’s a shame really. Why do people resort to this? Must have something to do with male bragging. Hurrhurrhurr this chili is so incredibly hot I’m getting stomach cramps from eating it. It’s delicious! Hurrhurrhurr of course I love it too. But I add half a bottle of habanero sauce because I like the way it tastes. There’s blood in my stool but HURRHURRHURR it’s so DELICIOUS!

Demon’s Souls is just that. Everyone pretends liking it. Yet we all know nobody NOT EVEN YOU really does like it.
Let’s face it. This is a game that prides itself on being hard. And not in the good old capcom Devil May Cry “you died twice, want to continue on easy?” way hard, but hard as in “the playtesters complained a lot about it being unplayable so we added more one hit kills – weak minded swine…” way. It’s not a game anyone in his right mind could possible enjoy playing. It’s a game that’s deliberately frustrating, hindering player progress, omitting almost any signposting, making sure there will be no fun had. Not even backwards or old school. Just idiotically bullyish mean. Entirely unenjoyable. This game must have been made by people who hate video games and the people who play them.

So why do people like it? They don’t. They pretend to. Oh it’s so good and gratifyingly hard. No it’s not. It’s just bullshit. You don’t like it. You just say you do so that maybe people will look up to you for being such a badass hardcore motherfucker to endure an experience like this.
Guess what. Your bluff has been called. You do not enjoy it because there is nothing to enjoy here. Even if you successfully finished the first level after a week of playing the game four hours a day. You hate the game. For wasting your time. For frustrating the fuck out of you. For making you trash your controller. Twice. You do not want to play on. But the bragging rights it gives you, oh they are so enjoyable.
Those have to be the only reason people have played this game. Bragging rights. Oh look ma, I’m so hardcore. This has also to be the reason the usually reliable gaming press has heaped praise on this abysmal piece of software.

And now there’s a new game coming along, a sequel. The developer already stated it will feature a “greatly increased” difficulty over the last game. Also it will be open world. My guess would be that there will be no saving the game, ever. No pause function. Also every single enemy in the game will have one-hit-kill attacks. And ONLY those. And obviously you have to be careful with the character creation, since you can also die there, which blocks the next character from being created in the next 48 hours.

Oh you phonies will love this game. It will feature all of your game of the year lists, so you can show to the world how fucking hardcore you are.
Fucking pathetic.

And that’s just the thing with games, scares like the infamous monster closets and other in-your-face ones are less scares, more heavy disturbances. When it comes to really, really scaring the player, very different, much more complicated measures must be taken, and very few games so far have managed to really scare and frighten me, not even speaking of keeping me up at night the way some movies have managed to do.

Dead Space is not really scary. Eerie sometimes, creepy at others, and very often stressful and disturbing, shocking even, making it sometimes really unpleasant to play. It is a very intense game, but the scares last only as long as the console is running. It’s a kind of horror experience that does not manage to get under the skin really.

Still playing can be unnerving. Mostly due to the superb use of audio cues and horrific imagery, as well as making the player plough through extremely tough situations like facing unstoppable super space zombies in a hard vacuum with the character’s air supply running out fast.
These situations are intense, nerve wrecking and brilliantly presented. But they don’t stay with the player beyond the game.

That is something few games are able to pull off really. The “horror” label is maybe falsely applied here, though Dead Space surely is exactly that. A horror game. Though maybe more than that it is a media item that firmly belongs into the splatter genre. Of course there are some mild allusions to body horror, the grotesquely deformed space zombies sometimes seemingly being aware of what they have been turned into, but those instances remain limited to a few certain types of enemies (or pieces of the environment) and are rarely really touched upon.

What does stay with the player after the game’s done is some of the backstory, especially the part told in the superb motion-comic pencilled by Ben Templesmith. The same aspects of the story told there are found again inside the game. People going insane, a crazy religious cult, space-zombies taking over. But that aspect is just a part of the backstory, it’s not something the player experiences firsthand. On top of it all, the superb motion comic is not included with the retail version of the game, so only those players who anticipated the game’s release enough in 2008 will have had read it before playing the game.

This does not mean however that Dead Space fails as a horror game. As that quick, intense scare, and of course as a splatter item it is quite good actually.
And it does offer highly memorable scenes and experiences, though a lot of those are not connected to the game being scary, but more to the beautifully realized and rendered environments and the truly outstanding soundscape.

Lords of Shadow is a curios game. A Japanese IP developed by a bunch of Spaniards. Voiced by a Brit and a Scotsman.
Their cultural background shines through on various occasions. Not only do they manage to feel really fresh and for me as a European authentic, but they bring things to the table gamers rarely see.
For one, matters of faith. Lords of Shadow is none of these weird popcultural items that feature something that closely resembles christian religion while being too sensitive to just go for it.
The characters in the game are devout Christians. Wary of the fates of their immortal souls. Whenever protagonist Gabriel encounters a fallen brother in arms, he goes down on one knee, crossing himself. The final battle is all about God’s love and forgiveness. The main quest more about atonement than anything else.

EA's Dante's Inferno went for a similar style of game, but featured a lot more In-Your-Face weird, over the top bordering-on-blasphemous portrayal of "Catholicism".

In this, Lords of Shadow is a game that wears the catholic background of it’s country of origin on it’s sleeve. It might not yet fully be there, it’s not a game that delves into the weirder parts of catholicism, though it’d really just be a matter of a paint job really to introduce relics of saints granting new kewl powers. EA’s Dante’s Inferno might be closer to that vision. But at the same time a bit too loud and willingly edgy and insensitive to really appeal.
To me, EA’s Dante’s Inferno is a game depicting Catholicism the way outsiders see it. Stark, ravingly mad, mostly. Lords of Shadow on the other hand seems less eager to treat Catholicism as a carnival freak show.
For the Castlevania game it seems like the character’s conviction is something that just comes naturally. It’s more a part of their whole being than them being constructed around the concept of “religious nut job so zealous he rips the Grim Reaper’s head off in the prolouge, steals his scythe and jumps headfirst into hell to SLAY THE DEVIL!!!”.

To this day, this game's cover encapsulates the spirit of Castlevania for me. Barbarian dude whipping the hell out of unholy, supernatural horrors.

To understand why I personally grew to absolutely adore Lords of Shadow, it’s important to know what Castlevania in it’s essence is for me. I never had a PSone. I never played Symphony of the Night, or at least not when it was important and relevant.
My key Castlevania experiences lie with the second installment for the original GameBoy, Castlevania II – Belmont’s Revenge and with the superb Super Castlvania IV for the SNES.
When I was a kid, Castlevania II easily was my favorite game on the little grey box. As with the games of that platform, it sure wasn’t as pretty as any of the other or later installments, but it bore a rich and imaginative selection of level and world design. It was a game that prominently featured huge boss monsters and – for a GameBoy game anyway – spectacular music. Not too many games of that era boasted 8bit versions of Bach for their semi-final bosses.

Mercurysteam manage to take me back to these days. Lord’s of Shadow looks a lot like what my kid self painted over the pixely grey-green GameBoy graphics of old. Having next to no experience with the games that came since, and not really being able to reconnect with them now, Lords of Shadow evokes in me some weird kind of gaming nostalgia to my very early days as a gamer.
Overall, the game’s art style is something to behold. It makes me wonder what Guillermo delToro’s upcoming game will look like, since mercurysteam already manage to bring his art team’s style to the gaming screen.

Gabriel's character design is the perfect mix of old and new. Barbarian and pretty boy.

The old boss monsters I remember are all there in some form#.
Also the look and feel of the early 90s games seems to have been recreated and updated to HD this time.
Lords of Shadow’s protagonist Gabriel Belmont’s character design is something of a mix between old and new. His build, haircut and gruff ruffled appearance bring back a bit of the good old barbarian Belmonts of old, while his crimson armor’s color palette seems to be closer to the looks of the more effeminate IGA-games protagonists.

To me, this game is a perfect addition to the Castlevania series. Having skipped the IGA titles, I’m not missing the Metroid-style exploration. Lords of Shadow still has some of that, no doubt. Though it’s no longer anywhere close to a necessity to finish the game.
Also I’m not really missing the screamingly colourful, very Japanese art style. Super Castlevania had a great color palette that grew more and more neon in the following installments.
Also it’s good having a (partially) barbaric Belmont back. Here’s to hoping they’re here to stay.

Biggest disappointment of the year 2010:

APB.
Plain and simple astoundingly few things worked in Realtime World’s uber-ambitious cops’n’robbers MMO. It all sounded like incredible great fun on paper. A mix of GTA’s open world playstyle with Counterstrike’s two teamed shooter approach, infused with on the spot matchmaking of PvP opposed missions. Topped off by an amazingly powerful character customization tool, and backed by a really massive fund. All developed by the man who gave us GTA and Crackdown. A formula that just had to produce something awesome.
Only, it didn’t. APB didn’t come together. At all. People moaned about the payment model that instead of being a straight subscription let the players buy hour packages of play time.
The net code didn’t work, the balancing was off, the graphics weren’t as good as expected, it didn’t sell well enough and before long, APB just broke Realtime World’s back.
APB was really an enormous waste of everything. Time, money and manpower. Eventually it cost a whole lot of talented developers their jobs. Oh and also it wasn’t a very good game. At least not in the state it shipped in. It could’ve been so great. That’s why it’s the #1 on this one.

All That Is Wrong With Gaming in 2010:

Call of Duty: Black Ops
Is it necessary to list why this game is here? It’s the fastest selling piece of entertainment in history, the most successful game (on the first days?) ever. Also it had one of the biggest, most expensive advertising campaigns in the business. But, to tell the truth, it isn’t that great a game. It’s an average shooter at best, a single player campaign that doesn’t try do a lot of very fun things apart from punishing the player for not sticking to the script while presenting some nice looking setpieces. These are the types of games that are responsible for gaming to have such a bad image. And we buy them by the millions.
These are the types of game that further the trend in the industry to become ever more blockbuster hungry.
These are the types of game that drive developers that produce well, but not incredibly well selling titles out of business when their corporate overlords are not pleased with the turnover. See Bizzare Creations.

Worst Trend of the Year 2010:

Everything Is Better With Multiplayer
It’s a given that this is not a trend that was anyhow new to this year. Time and again it seems publishers cry out in panic about some franchises not yet having the inevitable online mode. Luckily we’re not longer seeing tacked on deathmatch modes, but this thing nowadays goes further. Halo – Reach’s single player campaign being obviously designed for co-op first, single play second. Bigwigs from the major publishers declaring the single player experience dead.
To me – I very, very rarely play anything but single player – this is a disturbing trend. Assassin’s Creed was a successful franchise without multiplayer. I understand it’s multiplayer mode is very good, unique and entertaining, well worth the development money. But the latest game would’ve sold well enough without it. Now focusing the franchise on multiplayer as Ubisoft seems to have announced hangs a bit weird with me.
So the trend is less adding multiplayer to everything, but turning every game into a multiplayer FIRST single player SECOND experience. Which is dismissing and undermining the narrative power of the medium of single player games.

The Downs in Gaming in 2010

Now on for some ranting and rambling about this year’s high profile releases.
This year in gaming was weird. Both great and greatly disappointing at the same time.
It started with a bang, the games fleeing last year’s Modern Warfare 2 release window. The first quarter was as strong as previously only holiday seasons had ever been. Bayonetta, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 2 launched within a month, starting the year on incredible high notes.
And it didn’t stop there. 2010 lacked the usual slump in releases.

Still, there were quite some games that – personally – disappointed. The long awaited Alan Wake, being a “psychological action thriller” as it says on the box, was too weak on the “psychological” and too strong on the “action” part. Basically a dark, one-big-gimmick shooter.
The similarly long awaited Splinter Cell: Conviction also was pretty much a letdown, not only because of the quite short single player campaign, but also because of the straightforwardness of level design, which compared to older iterations clearly was a step backwards.
Storytelling gamers’ favourite Obsidian Entertainment underperformed twice, with Alpha Protocol being a glitchy, unwieldy and weirdly unpolished experience with some very good ideas and Fallout: New Vegas bearing similar traits.
Halo – Reach presented Bungies weakest narrative feat yet while being an outstanding technical achievement.

Red Dead Redemption, for many the game of the year, featured some wonky controls, bad optimization, especially noticeable in the delay between menu screens, and an overall feeling of a lack of player impact on the world, since no matter how many random gangs the player shot down, they’d just respawn anyway, money being mostly useless, thus mechanically devaluing most of the player’s actions outside of the main story. This seems to be a problem of very very many open world games of this generation, though the later released Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood saw the player having much more of an lasting impact on the game world.

Warren Spector’s lovechild Epic Mickey fell flat with most critics and fans alike, being strong in vision but weak in execution. Which was this years problem with most “auteur” games. Ron Gilbert’s [thanks Andy] Death Spank comes to mind.
And of course the games which were basically just remakes of successful formulas. Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Star Craft, Halo…

This doesn’t mean that 2010 was a bad year in gaming, just a weird one with too much output and too little real innovation and quality in the same titles.

But anyway. Games of the year. Or rather – first things first –

Game of the year.

Minecraft. Simple. It’s an alpha version of an indigame with no marketing except for word of mouth. And everyone, really EVERYONE is playing it. At least everyone of the (gaming) people I follow on Twitter. People do totally mind boggling things with this. It’s a mix of Lego, Inception and 16bit Zelda (only in 3D).
Hours fly by when playing. It’s really absurd noting it’s 5AM and all you’ve been doing since midnight is digging holes and stacking up resources so you can then start building something totally awesome in the future. Very, VERY few commercial games get me to do this these days.
Making Minecraft my GotY is mostly due to what it is. It’s less what I’ve personally done with it. Sure, I’ve played a lot. It’s just pure admiration. There should be a whole huge amount of lessons to be learned for game design from this title.

Runner up:
Bioshock 2

Big Sister is watching

Honorary Mentions:

Heavy handed?

Red Dead Redemption.

Not much of an open-world standoff this year...

Bayonetta.

Platinum Games proves time and again that they are among the last Japanese developers who really dare pushing the envelope. This one game here is an absolute masterpiece, one that follows in the footsteps of Devil May Cry and squeezes everything imaginable out of the formula.
It’s not a very deep game, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s blindingly fast, blazingly furious and bucketloads of tounge-in-cheek fun. Essentially it’s my “Videogames – the Videogame” moment.

“I volunteer you to speak to EA’s studio heads; they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very comfortable moving the discussion towards how we make connected gameplay – be it co-operative or multiplayer or online services – as opposed to fire-and-forget, packaged goods only, single-player, 25-hours-and you’re out. I think that model is finished.”

It doesn’t appear to me like he’s saying that actually. Sure, he talks about connected gameplay and multiplayer. But also about how “packaged goods only” are finished, and about online services. Essentially giving a big game a longer life, and getting some extra bucks out of the consumers with some post-launch DLC.
There’s hardly any game out there these days that doesn’t make use of one of these things, and if that’s the way to correctly read this, then he’s right.

I said in my previous post, that the industry has to reconsider it’s business model if it wants to survive. The thing is, single player experience is essentially analog to reading a book. It’s something one person does alone at home. Usually. As with books, the experience can be shared of course, you can read a book to people, and you can have people watching you play a single player game. However, that has no impact on the business model of binding a customer’s spare time to one product for weeks.
So having the customer come back for some more, like DLC expansions, might be the right move to make, extending the life of a title for a small sum.
Multiplayer does add another vector of possible sales though, in addition to single player expansions. Map packs, weapon packs, and the likes. So for this business model having a strong multiplayer sure seems like a viable, profitable addition.

The recent focus on multiplayer experience beating out single player is a bit troublesome though. Not all games need a form of multiplayer to survive on the market. Take a look at how many people, me included, do not have an Xbox-Live!-Gold subscription. I don’t know about those others, but for me it sure as hell does not mean that I’m buying fewer games since I’m not able to play online. Bioshock sold quite well before it had multiplayer. The whole third person action catalouge does provide solid sales without it. God of War online multiplayer? Bayonetta? Unlikely.

The biggest problem in this debate is that where the single player experience is easily a new medium for telling stories akin to the ones told in books, movies and TV series, multiplayer is not. At least, most of the time it’s not. There’s a nice quote from Steve Jackson Games’ Illuminati card game, “Artificial Intelligence beats Real Stupidity”. Which is how I feel especially towards online RPGs. While it might be possible to go for some good storytelling with that kind of games, most of the time this doesn’t happen in the field. At least, it doesn’t happen as intended. There might be people who engage a lot in actual roleplaying playing MMOs, but when it comes down to it, the vast majority of people doesn’t.

Single player RPGs remain the best way to experience a story in a videogame. There may be bad AI. But bad AI can be ignored. Bad human players are a whole other level of immersion breakers. It will be interesting to see how EA / BioWare fare with Star Wars: The Old Republic in that field. It seems BioWare try their best to make this into an actually story driven MMO.
Personally, this is something I don’t see happening in this environment, despite the skills that BioWare brings to the table.
The game will of course have a strong narrative, but the game will also be gamed to death by some players. That’s of course still not saying anything about how successful this one will be. After all, the MMO market has one gargantuan problem for anyone that isn’t part of it, and that problem would be Blizzards and World of Warcraft.

Also, to this day there are rather few blockbuster titles that fare well without a single player part. Call of Duty might be driven by the multiplayer, but the single player experience also remains a strong part of thw whole package. It’s strongly debatable if the Halo franchise could survive on it’s multiplayer component alone. Of course there were some titles that tried. Section 9, which if I recall correctly failed miserably. Shadowrun, which did the same. There are of course Counterstrike and Team Fortress 2 as well as the Left 4 Dead series. But those are special, and also mostly PC titles.

Now things become complicated. First of all, comparing sales figures for the most successful game of all time, Call of Duty: Black Ops, it becomes clear that the console market is the dominant one for big franchises. At the same time, the PC market is the one where online mulitplayer games that do not feature a single player component are most likely to survive. The PC has World of Warcraft, and other successful MMO titles. The consoles do not, yet the biggest selling titles sell the most on the console platforms.

Now of course it would be interesting to see how many of those who bought CoD:BlOps have played or are playing it online, and how the ratios of single- to multiplayer are on what platform.
Ultimately calling the single player experience as such “finished” won’t hold, and I find it a bit strange to see so many of the big publishers trying to rabidly push their franchises into online multiplayer. The upside is that it’s no longer just the tacked on deathmatch. But it can’t be argued that single player and online multiplayer experiences in general always are very, very different things, appealing to very different people.

One of the problems of the gaming market is it’s very nature. Movies are similarly expensive – if not more expensive – to produce as AAA games are these days, but for once “item” prices are lower, and while there are about as many huge movie publishers as there are game publishers, the decision to see movie A over movie B doesn’t bind 8 – 48 hours of the customers free time he’s to spend – most likely – alone at home in front of his TV / computer screen.
This is a massive problem for times like the holiday season, when a huge load of new games compete for the customer’s money. It’s easy enough for a moviegoer to spend an evening watching two films. Even at the theater. It’s not too much time “wasted” and it won’t cost him too much money to do so.

With games however, the situation is very different. Even if the customer actually goes out and buys more than one game per month or per season and NOT just limits himself to the uberhyped StarCrafts and Calls of Duty, chances are low that he’ll buy a – full priced – game he hasn’t heard of on impulse or because his friends tell him that it’s great.
This might be a different story for indi titles and small, cheap downloadables, though those actually worsen the situation for the big expensive games.

It’s all coming down to time and money. A movie ticket – independent movie or blockbuster – can be had from 5 to 15€ over here – the latter only if it’s a 3D one. A full priced game on release day will cost the customer somewhere between 60 and 80€ (in German retail stores, average prices). A movie offers anywhere between one and possibly three hours of entertainment, that’s usually enjoyed together with other people. A full priced game is most likely to be played alone at home. I’d even go the conservative route here and even call online multiplayer an activity that’s enjoyed alone at home. This will bind the customers free time anywhere between, as I said, eight hours and several days during which no other pastime activity and no other game is likely to be consumed. So basically, when a publisher goes and makes a game like Red Dead Redemption, that game might sell like hotcakes, but it’s likely to keep the customer away from other publications – even from the same publisher – if it’s any good.

A game like Minecraft is the worst nightmare of the industry in this situation. An independent title that’s relatively cheap to acquire, reaching a spectacularly massive spread of people and offering basically endless gameplay opportunities, binding customers away from the multi million dollar products on offer.

But what is the way out of this? Making games shorter? Maybe. But there’s still multiplayer. Making multiplayer a paid-for service? Seems some will go to try this. World of Warcraft proves it’s possible. Though it’d be foolish trying to take on this game on it’s own turf. But that is another story. Lowering retail prices? Still not going to increase circulation enough when games still bind people for days on end.
Ultimately the solution to this is somewhere in between. Lowering the production costs – even if that means less ultrashiny games – lowering prices and lowering the game’s length. Short games that are cheap to produce and cheap to buy can be very successful.