A new game comes out. You love it. You play it everyday and sink an embarrassing number of hours into the multiplayer. A week later, you find out said game has been "patched" and now is nowhere near as good as it used to be. Why would this happen? What was wrong with it? Probably nothing. But that doesn't matter. While you were busy having fun with your new game/beta, someone else was squealing to the developers about how much they hated their style and originality. How much they hated it for being different. Sound familiar? Keep reading.
After the patch, you don't play it as much as you used to. You don't like the way people play it now and that has put you off the game. Why? Because YOU didn't speak up. "I don't need to speak up. I'm loving the game and playing it instead of whining about it on internet forums." True. But while you sit back quietly, a few people (with alternate accounts maybe?) clog up the developer's time with complaints, thus they begin to think things need to change. Why wouldn't they? "Everyone" seems to dislike the way things work at the moment. Except that it's not everyone. It's the Loud Minority.
It seems like it'll keep happening. That there's no escape. Developer Cool comes out with a refreshing or unique take on a tried and true formula and it gets shot down by the few people who didn't like it and couldn't keep their mouths shut. Then the game goes to hell. Sure, we could point fingers at the developers and accuse them of being sell-outs, but maybe we need to take a step back and think, "Maybe it's me."
There are a plethora of examples I could pull from my memory of game changes that were mostly unwanted and unneeded. There's Uncharted 2 which had a health point reduction that some claim "noobified" the game. There's Killzone 3 with the nerfing of the weighted controls (yes, delayed response IS a catalyst for weight in a game), and then there's the increased movement speed in SOCOM 4 which I felt turned it into a run and gun.
Us gamers, the civilized gamers who appreciate original ideas and varying concepts, need to speak up. It may seem silly to go onto an internet forum or thread just to praise a game, but it's important. We cannot continue to let radical alterations in our favorite games tarnish the unique experiences that bright game developers try to give us. Speak up on the internet and tell that dev how much you love their game. When we only allow negative feedback to flow into the development studios, bad things happen.
Will you let your voice be heard? Or will you let the next game you buy be another statistic?
*Thanks goes to GenoZStriker for the inspiration for this blog
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You got it backwards.
Developers are looking to please the majority. The ones that don't know or care about the game until developers make it accessible and lower the standard to their fitting. The ones that will casually try it, the ones that developers try to make familiar and easy so that they don't whine and give up so quickly, the ones that will play it for a week and then never come back again.
The loud minority are actually the ones trying to tell developers to stop with the dumbing down/"COD"ifying of games. Devs don't listen and continue to spin the situation by saying they are making games "accessible" It's a predictable cycle: casual crowd tries it out for a week then goes back to COD.
It's not the developer's fault though. It's the publishers. SOCOM, Killzone 3, Resistance 3, Uncharted 3 have all made claims that they want to make the games more accessible and the obvious common factor here is that Sony is their publisher. They fund and set the game's outcome and look towards what is successful. All the above games I listed took the fundamentals of COD: fast action and constant rewarding to keep players coming back. I can't imagine that GG and Zipper would suddenly want to do the drastic changes they did with their games when they had something so unique.
Look at how DICE makes such a great game and EA craps all over it by being EA. Look at how IW staff quit because of upper management. Devs are limited and can only take so much crap
I totally get your point--and it's a good one at that.
I'd argue that it's important to subscribe to the developers original vision. A good developer should hold enough QA and Beta testing to really flesh out their vision. If 6 months after release they're living in message boards writing down every criticism then patching the game then well, they've already failed.
I buy games 'day one' to play day one. If a developer can't develop something meaningful on launch I'm not sticking around. If they spend the next two years patching and completely changing the multiplayer--they had no idea what they were doing in the first place.
I guess what I'm saying is: patches are for bugs, gameplay is day one. If you can't handle a game on launch go back to COD.
Killzone is a strange one, I remember on KZ2 there were an overwhelming amount of people complaining about the weighted controls, I personally liked them (along with others) but since the game worked for us we didn't complain or voice our opinions. Fast forward to KZ3 and it's no surprise that GG changed the controls and reduced the dead zone, increasing responsiveness. Now loads of people are complaining about that, It makes me wonder, were there this many people that liked the controls in KZ2? because it didn't seem that way at the time. Now their game was changed and I bet the people who wanted the controls to be different in KZ2 aren't even playing KZ3 anyway!
Personally it does not bother me, I enjoy KZ3 probably more so than KZ2 and still play it regularly. Those who whine about games not playing how they want are true noobs in my opinion, if your good at gaming you adapt.. People will complain no matter what these days!
It's been this way with World of Warcraft for a while. Blizzard comes out with new, challenging content, people bitch about the difficulty, Blizz nerfs more than they need to, and bam, you get the outcry of people who thought that they content was dumbed down.
However, having said that, there are also people that are too stubborn or feel like their too entitled on the other side. They don't think ANYTHING should be changed even when it's obvious something's got to, they don't think ANYTHING should be nerfed even when it's too obvious that a boss fight relies on cheapness to kill you countless times without you being able to know what the hell you're supposed to do, and just think that devs don't have the right to change things when they think of something to improve the game. This is just as troubling as those whining for a nerf or a change, and they are just as loud.
So you get the impasse. They are both equally important to please, but you can't please one side without pissing off the other because neither side is willing to put aside their differences and let the devs come up with a way that will please everyone. This is because they see the cheap difficulty (or ridiculously easy difficulty) and changes or lack thereof as weapons to drive the other side out of that game's community. Some people in WoW have been like "get rid of the casuals", when casual gamers have just as much of a right to play the same games as we hardcores do. This is mostly because people think casual equals bad.
Your right, but it works both ways, and until the two sides can shut up long enough to listen to the other sides POV with an open mind, this epidemic will never change.
The thing with the patches... That has literally never happened to any game I've ever played.
Most patches I see in games are just minor patches in which the differences aren't really noticeable. Bug fixes, if you will.