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THE AGE OF THE EPIC GAME NEEDS TO END

25/2/2019

10 Comments

 
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You've possibly heard that first week physical sales of Anthem - developed by Bioware and published by Electronic Arts - have been less than half of those achieved by Bioware's previous release, Mass Effect Andromeda.

Furthermore, Anthem Is already being heavily discounted in the UK - down to £39 on Amazon, as I write this. These are not promising signs for a big budget game which EA was clearly positioning as a property with a healthy afterlife. 

Suffice to say, the usual outlets are picking through the potential reasons why - an iffy demo, poor word of mouth, the damage done to Bioware's reputation by Andromeda - but nobody is really looking at it in the context of where the market is at this month.

In recent weeks we've had the release of Apex Legends - another massive online battle royale (and free-to-play to boot) - plus Crackdown 3, Metro Exodus and Far Cry New Dawn. All are big games, all are shooters, and all are shrieking for attention from similar audiences at precisely the same time. And that's before you factor in the long shadows cast by all of the games released last year. 

I mean... are all these games companies run by idiots?

​Yes.

And not any old idiots: epic idiots.
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ANTHEM AND US
EA has heralded Anthem as a new IP - indicating it was hoping the game would give birth to a series that would stick around for years. 

Casey Hudson, General Manager of BioWare, has rasped: “I’m excited, anxious and incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished. I sincerely hope our players enjoy what we have created, and I look forward to the countless stories we’ll tell in the world of Anthem in the weeks and months to come.”

Yeah, I bet he's anxious.

But wait! You need to play this game, because you "Will square off against the nefarious Monitor, the leader of the militaristic Dominion who seeks to bend the very powers of creation and destruction to his will. The Freelancers must thwart the Monitor’s schemes to control the Anthem of Creation, or else he could tear the entire world apart and plunge the planet into ultimate chaos."

Forget your regular, everyday, chaos. This is ultimate chaos!

What's more, EA has been promising plenty of ongoing support, adding: "​Over the next 90 days alone the game will deliver new missions, new rewards, a new stronghold and more. Perhaps the most noteworthy inclusion will be the introduction of the first Cataclysm, a world-changing event that will bring with it an entirely new experience. During the course of the game’s life new stories, characters and villains will emerge and players will be treated to ongoing excitement and conflicts."

Ooooh! The first Cataclysm?!? Really?!?! Can't wait to see what the nefarious Monitor and his Dominion throw at me in that! I just hope I can gain control of the Anthem of Creation!!!!!!!?!

Who the Hell cares?

I mean, really. What are you, Bioware - twelve?

LITTLE INTEREST
I've written already about why I've little interest in playing Anthem - not least its multiplayer-only, Destiny-homaging, gameplay - but there's another reason it's leaving me cold... and that reason is this reason: epic fatigue.

I'm not just talking about the size of the game - the open world, the missions, the raids and all that (though the massive size of modern games must surely be having an effect on sales across the board) - but the way in which every triple-A mainstream release wants us to view it as somehow The Latest Most Important Must Play Game Evaaaar!

It's the same affliction which has in the past threatened every major summer movie; at one point it appeared as if every film released between May and September would climax with some world-ending CGI battle, that sense of the stakes being as high as they can possibly get.

And yet, Marvel changed the course of the summer blockbuster at precisely the right moment, succeeding in mixing up its super-hero movies - to great box office reward - peppering them with humour, and making the stakes more personal, with movies like Spider-Man: Far From Home and Ant-Man. Unfortunately, almost every major game release now gives us Avengers: Infinity War, and this past month alone we've had about six of them. 

It's not sustainable, and it's boring, battering us with post-apocalyptic lore, and locations with hollow-sounding names like The Eye of Forfeited Gusts, and weapons called things like The Allegorical Shredder of Carpathian, and characters with names such as The Blobe-Lord of Gnarly Distortion.

All that rubbish turned me off in Destiny, but Anthem apparently goes all-out - in true Bioware fashion - with the minutiae of its world-building and backstory, when the most players would've been happy with a game where you got to fanny around like Iron Man. ​
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THE ROT
I dunno precisely when the rot set in, but Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has a lot to answer for. That chilling moment when the nuke goes off remains one of the most effective shockers in gaming history, but it also kicked off an arms race between game makers to one-up the scale of everything that preceded their latest game. And now it's beginning to affect the sales performance of those games. 

Tellingly, the most recent entry in the Call of Duty series hasn't done as well as its predecessors... and it's not alone in being the latest instalment in a previously mega-selling franchise to underperform.  Destiny continued Bungie's weird fetish for epicness, even going as far to tell players that some of it weapons were "legendary", but Destiny 2 has been a howling disappointment for Activision. 

Thing is, you look at what kids are playing and it's Fortnite, where there's none of that lore, there's no story - it's all bright colours and silly victory dances. Similarly, last year's biggest game was Red Dead Redemption 2 which, while being a massive game, nevertheless tells a story where the stakes are relatively intimate - they just happen to play out against a backdrop that's visually epic.  

Regardless, most triple-A developers seem to overlook why that works, and remain obsessed with their world-building to the point of narcissism. Their po-faced, sub-Tolkien-with-exoskeletons guff is tired and dull, and it's anathema when it comes to asking players to connect with these experiences.

It's scale and verbiage designed to appeal to the mind and not the heart - and in an age where we're all feeling disconnected, I believe players want more personal experiences instead of being hit over the head with a book of made-up sci-fi history bollocks.

The age of the epic game needs to come to a close, and until we start getting more original, more authentic, games - and less of this tedious me-too epicness - I've had it with these blockbuster releases. 
10 Comments
Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
25/2/2019 05:45:27 pm

The settings are epic, but the gameplay is just “shoot an enemy ten thousand times until it falls over, for a small chance at a slightly better weapon that will let you shoot a slightly tougher monster the same amount of times.”

Metro is all about the story, the shootery enables your progress.

Meanwhile I am playing Rimworld, which is just about your little community on some forgotten frontier planet trying to survive, thrive, and maybe build a spaceship to leave. There’s so much to do and you care so much about it all, unlike the genero-bots and Circling Poets of Arium and twelfth cataclysm.

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Mr Biffo
25/2/2019 06:01:40 pm

Oh don't you worry - I'm getting Metro.

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Pete Davison link
25/2/2019 06:28:08 pm

I haven't played a big budget epic for ages now. A lot of the games I do play have epic elements as you describe, but the JRPGs I tend to favour have much better balance between the whole "saving the world" thing and interpersonal interactions. And by that I mean they tend to place a strong focus on those interpersonal reactions rather than the overarching metanarrative. Makes for much more compelling games... for me, anyway. Everyone's mileage may vary.

Take the game I'm currently covering on my site, 428: Shibuya Scramble. On the macro level, this is about a kidnapping and a bioterrorist attack on Tokyo. But those aspects are pretty much the least important things about that game; they form a backdrop to the truly interesting stuff, which is how the multiple protagonists each explore questions of identity and fulfilment. No jetpacks required.

Epics can work, and have done numerous times in the past... but in a game like Anthem you need to balance the lore dumps with the entertaining, enjoyable action. This is something that BioWare has never really been all that good at, for all the praise they get (or got, rather), and they've been really circling the drain since ME3 for me personally.

At this point I'm pretty sure Anthem is going to kill them off once and for all. And they'll be added to the depressingly long list of companies that modern EA has eaten up whole, half-digested and then shat out on the side of the road somewhere without even bothering to wipe.

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Taucher
25/2/2019 06:49:11 pm

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve tried, but I couldn’t. These games are all so bland and it seems EA are audience testing their ‘product’ into boring oblivion. I guess it’s a problem with massive studios - they need hit after hit and the safest way to do that is to do what has worked before, again and again. Until it doesn’t (work) and isn’t (a hit).

I’ll sound like an old fart but I miss the days (ie the 80s) when games were based on your favourite tv soap or falconry or other esoteric things.

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Wapojif
25/2/2019 06:58:30 pm

Absolutely. I've been championing indie games for years now as they offer far more innovation than these "epic" AAA romps - the vast majority are getting tired now.

What I'm interested in this year is the sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest. Nothing else matters. Not even Wensleydale.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
25/2/2019 09:02:55 pm

Indie does create some interesting things, but I quite like BBB-titles, or whatever you call all those slightly off-beat games that are too big and expensive to be indie but not enough to be AAA that companies like THQ put out and which don't seem to be as abundant as they once were.

You know, the 7.5/10 games that the developers didn't have the money to perfect, but which at least had some kind of actual identity or an interesting idea here and there that justified the purchase, like Brutal Legend, Psi-Ops or Destroy All Humans. The ones you had a pretty good time with and maybe don't remember all of, but at least remember a couple of standout moments of fondly.

On that note, I'm currently playing Yakuza Kiwami and enjoying its relatively small-stakes story and meaningful locations, which despite being an old game with a new coat of paint feels a bit fresh with its relatively simplicity and focus on story, character and detail over giant-scale warfare and trillion-acre maps.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
25/2/2019 08:04:57 pm

My eyes completely glazed over at the summary of this game's tedious lore, which makes Warhammer 40K's codexes look like Hugo award nominees.

Luckily that's a good thing, because my eyes had already completely glazed over at the very mention of the name Anthem in the title, so I actually couldn't see at all until I got to that part of the article. That second glazing has essentially resulted in my developing biological bifocal lenses, restoring the vision that Anthem initially stole, and somehow enhancing it to 20:20. Thanks, Anthem!

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Col. Asdasd
25/2/2019 11:42:17 pm

Great analysis, Mr B.

So many games spend hours showering you in proper nouns and nonsense made up words, thinking you're going to be interested in their worlds simply because you bought the game. The last thing I want to have to do is learn the intricacies of a big, bloated setting at the same time I'm getting to grips with the gameplay: it's like you're setting me double homework.

Give me a character, with a goal, give me a connection to the world and a reason to care about it. Don't just force feed me the Silmarillion but with Space Wizards and expect me to not to choke on it.

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James Walker
26/2/2019 12:15:56 am

Huh huh, Rimworld!

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Paul
26/2/2019 10:00:43 am

In the late 1990s, when at some company I worked at we seemed to spend a bot too much time playing some flavour of Quake over the network, fragging each other (the MD was a bit of an instigator of this), I did get the feeling that one day we’d be having massive games where massive wars would be fought on massive planets.

Now those games are kind of there, I kind of wish they weren’t. They all look much the same. I’ve seen various videos of gameplay, and I have to say that while I *love* the massiveness of the worlds (despite my reservations in my letter the other week), the whole warfare and shooting of stuff just leaves me cold.

Ho hum. I’m older now. I guess that’s a factor.

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