Hype: the silent evil that looms.

With all the games coming out this holiday season there are no shortage of reviews and opinions flying around. These reviews are scoring almost all games in the high 9s yet picking apart every little tiny problem. After reading, I’m filled with massive doubt about buying these games with the only reason to pick them up is to have something to play. I think this problem stems from the hype games get before release, so much hype that will never get lived up to. Game scores should actually score the game itself and not whether it lived up to the hype it generated.

So how do we fix this? Game developers, fire your PR departments. 1 year before you release your game, release a teaser trailer. 6 months before release put out an in game trailer. For the 3 months before the game goes gold, release 1 developer diary video per month and conduct some interviews. When I play your games I want to say “Wow I’ve never seen that before!” and not “that was in a trailer I saw last week.”. Suprise me, it will make the game experience better.

Why game developers make bad gamers.

I started playing Assassins Creed this week. The game was hyped to ridiculous levels and I couldn’t wait to give it a try. I have a lot of respect for the Montreal Ubisoft studio that put it together, having played their previous Prince of Pursia and Splinter Cell games. They are amazing animators, level designers, and presenters in general. I was expecting Assassins Creed to be an improvement and innovation over their previous titles and that’s what I got, sort of. The animations are the best I’ve seen in a game to date, the level designs are detailed and massive, and the voice acting and UI is top notch.  The main feature of the game is the ability to climb on any building, if it looks like you can grab onto something, you can. Jumping from roof top to roof top while evading guards was one of the more unique gaming experiences I’ve had in a while.

After a few hours of playing, all this excellence was crushed by repetitive missions, side quests that marginally furthered the story and provided no gameplay incentives, invisible walls that ruin the entire sense of freedom, and a counter kill feature which creates a fighting system that’s too easy, making the whole running across roof tops to evade guards unnecessary. So now that all the fun and excitement has been sucked out the game I’m trying to decide if I want to finish it. I hear the game changes things up towards the end and has a cool ending, but is that enough to justify the time and annoyance of assassinating 7 more characters just to finish it? I’m going to give it one more try before making a decision.

What does this mini review have to do with the title of this post? As a game developer I appreciate the technical and artistic achievements Ubisoft has made. They created an amazing technology platform, and worked a unique story ontop of it. And therein lies the problem as that’s all the game is, a tech demo with a story. I constantly ask how they did that with the amazing technology, and why they did that when it comes to their design decisions that ruined the game.

Part of gaming is suspension of disbelief and its no longer working on me, making playing games less and less enjoyable. When you’re second guessing what the developers were thinking  and admiring what they did well, you really lose out on the experience. I hope to be a gamer again someday, until then I’m going to spend more time making games than playing them so I don’t feel like such a critical bastard.

UPDATE:

So I finally finished Assassins Creed. As I expected the ending moments were much of the same. Counter killing hundreds of soldiers and invisible walls. Only this time I wasn’t able to move past the invisible wall  until I killed all the guards in that area. Once I killed the guards and moved to the next area I hit another invisible wall with more guards to kill. This happened 5 times in a row. I was about ready to just turn off the Xbox360 until I got to the final battle. I thought I had won until all of a sudden I was in another final battle. What about the word final doesn’t Ubisoft understand?

 After I dispatched this next “boss” I had to fight another final battle. WTF? Ok so this third guy bit the dust and the credits started rolling. I was so relieved. I sit there and watch the credits with glee and as they were ending I went to turn the Xbox360 off and noticed I got kicked back into the game. IT WASN’T OVER!

I won’t give any details on what happened next since I don’t want to spoil it for people that haven’t played the game. Needless to say, I spent an hour walking around a room trying to find a way to end this cruel game. I had reached the peak of frustration so I checked online to see if this was normal and it was. Assassins Creed has no ending. Ubisoft, do you remember how to make a game over screen anymore or was that just not ported from last gen to next gen.

Rent it, enjoy the story, have other people play through the middle of it so you’re not bored, and don’t expect an ending. Nuff’ said.