Down But Not Out: Pressing F to revive

Standard

Coming back from vacation I found some time to check up on the blog. It’s been over a year since the last post which felt kinda dumb because I’ve been writing stuff all year. All the posts just ended up in draft state I could never seem to bother to pull them out of. [cue drama voice] Until now.

[Roll montage of heavy editing, darling killing and screenshotting. End on editor with coffee stains and unbuttoned shirt looking tired but pleased.]

So I’ve got a theme refresh upcoming and five pieces cued up for publishing. There was a lot more on Hitman for some reason but if you think the one that I am going to publish is a meandering mess, you should see the others. Yikes. Please enjoy.

Why do we need yet another DayZ clone?

Standard

What is it about…. What are you’re trying to do here that you think other – you know, like, the DayZs of the world and what not… What is it about having this kind of… The angle you’re taking, the thing that separates it away from those competitors, I guess.

I don’t know much about games journalism or the kind of industry auto eroticism event that is E3. So the premise of this post may be very naive. The quote above is my painstaking transciption of a question – if you can call it that – by Danny O’Dwyer of Gamespot to a Sony rep about the zombie-survival MMO H1Z1 being showcased at E3. I know from experiences that coming up with intelligent sounding questions on the spot can be exceedingly hard but just to be clear, the question was part of a sitdown interview, not a shouted drive-by question on the showroom floor.

My point isn’t that O’Dwyer should have prepared himself better – though he clearly should have, it’s not like it’s not an obvious question to ask – but that he seems to be tying knots on his tongue trying not to sound critical. Here’s the same question, put simply:

Zombie-survival MMO games are a dime a dozen these days. Why do we need another?

My wording, however, implies the possibility that Sony’s game is not only unoriginal but possibly superfluous in a too-crowded me-too-market. Which would be critical in a journalism sense (not in a ‘your-game-is-shite’ sense).

Which leaves me with the  – as I said, possibly very naive – conclusion that these kind of events truly are love fests between industry and game press that brook no critical attitude towards the wares on display.

WTF

Quote

We must have played very different version of GW2, because when it played it it’s WvW was among the worst PvP I’ve ever experienced.

Nothing like DAOC at all. The CC was far too weak for a good open world PvP game. You need powerful, AoE CC in a good open world PvP game else the team with numbers almost always wins.

MobileAssaultDuck, comment on an RPS article on Elder Scrolls Online

I sometimes suspect I’m missing out on stuff by adopting the dismissive Yahtzee stance on mumorpugers. But the sheer AI (acronoymic impenetrability) of the comment above, makes me think that regardless of the merits of MMORPGs, it’s not going to be worth the effort required to enter that particular domain of gaming. Yeah, I could google all of it, but then I could also just play games I enjoy.