On one hand there is this great material to cover, yet also the urge to put pressure on other developers to raise their standards. I'm putting together some material and propositions for a large website that has been neglecting the armchair general masses, my goal is to try extend this sort of quality coverage beyond just the hardcore gamers who will see it anyway. Sadly though the games industry is dragging behind, despite being so huge. Even when it comes to music; the amount of cross-promotional opportunities lost makes me want to hurt kittens.
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I hate checking 15 different sites for the same regurgitated facts. Give us something NEW people.
One thing I have been wrestling with this whole time is how to redefine my role as reviewed in this context of updated preview stuff. It all seems like roses and lasagna to be a game reviewer (substitute a favorite dish and romantic odor for those in different cultures), but it comes with some really odd issues to deal with in this case.
On the one hand, I love having access to the inside track on a game I really want to play. I have made no secret for years that CK2 was a title I wanted Paradox to make, and that CK1, for all its warts, was a fun game to play. In fact, the warts and the game's very troubled development cycle has made me and the other old people around here desire a sequel all the more. (For those wondering how screwed up it was, read Johan's comments in this
thread.) Just having access to the initial preview was every bit as wonderful as I hoped. CK2 includes the kind of mechanics I have lobbied for in the past, it makes the game more interesting for low tier rulers, and it even included a "pick any date" function which I always thought would be something they would never implement. Hell, even the preview copy I have is in such good shape in terms of basic QA that I could give the game 3 stars right now. I've had fewer CTDs in 90 hours of playing the preview than I had with the first month of CK's initial release. (Let's keep it that way, guys.
)
If I had more time, I'd love to stream a game or record and post with a voice over (the advantage of recording and doing narration is that I can edit the footage to be more coherent and relevant). In fact, since the version I have is on Steam, I could even tease community members with an "hours played" update every week, just to make everyone green with envy. Hell, I could even dress up in a cheerleader outfit and lead the forum in a series of motivational cheers for the staff. I'm sure my Adonis-like figure and Brad Pitt hair would be a real hit in a skirt and pom-poms.
But here's the problem.
Guess who's going to review the game for Avault when it comes out? Me, that's who. I'm really the only person on staff who "gets" the more in-depth strategy games. That doesn't mean my colleagues are stupid; far from it. But it does mean that if a strategy game of any description wants a fair shake by someone who at least understands the basics of various genres, then I've got to be the one who takes a look at it. But if I'm going to review the game, how can I maintain the appearance of fairness if I'm over here streaming the games I play and chatting about how much I love it? All it takes is for one person to go over to Avault and complain that I'm biased, and we end up with the debacle we had with my
EU:Rome Review. I got burned for that review, even though all the major parties involved (Paradox staff, Avault staff) knew my position in the whole thing. There was no secret conspiracy, but I ended up looking like a fool. And you know what? They were right. No, I don't mean I whitewashed a crappy game (I didn't; Rome was a great game at the time, and it was an antidote to the "everything has to be like Total War or Age of Empires" mood in the industry.). What I mean is that the perception of bias was enough to neutralize any credibility I had, regardless of the objective quality of my statements.
Then some clever person like you comes along and points out that there are all kinds of cross-promotional opportunities lost because the industry is lagging behind. And you know what? You're right. In fact, I chat with my editors periodically about page hits and that sort of thing, and if you walked up to my virtual desk over at Avault and said, "Look, dude, you stream the game once a week, and we guarantee X number of additional hits. You stream it twice and archive a detailed commentary once a week, and you earned yourself some serious ad revenue" I'd be very tempted to say, "Hell yeah, sign me up! When do I qualify for the private jet and with the wet bar and Denise Richards circa 1999 look-a-like twins?"
So, what the hell am I supposed to do? I already am worried that my comments about the game so far are enough to get angry people to post pointlessly negative feedback when I get the review up. In fact, there are some heartless souls that would probably cry out, "You are a sellout like IGN/Gamespot/Whatever!" (Note: I am not saying they are sellouts or industry shills, but from the feedback we get on our site, our readers like that we are not like the big boys in the industry.) But on the other hand, how can I ignore the updated preview on my computer? How can ignore comments posted in the community by people who are misinformed? If I am silent about such things, then I'm not really covering the subject properly. If I let people rant incoherently when a simple, "Hey, I just played it last night, and what you are talking about isn't even in the game right now" could solve the problem and keep everyone better informed, then am I actually doing a disservice to the strategy gamers I purport to represent?
And this does not even take into account my academic interest in the gaming industry. I've got a conference paper on medievalisms in strategy games coming up in May at the International Congress of Medieval Studies (KZoo for those in the know), so even tiny little details like the implementation of the homosexual trait are of significant academic interest. Let's face it. I would never have gotten so involved in the game industry if I didn't find questions of game design interesting. I was never very good at programming (C++ was taught to me by someone who never really used the language), but the mechanics and rules of games are something I find fascinating. It's not just cool that anti-Popes are in from a historical perspective, but how they decided to implement such a controversial and certainly medieval thing is interesting.
What I'm saying in a very roundabout way is that this is kind of a new thing for me and I don't know where the lines between informing people and being accused of collusion are really to be drawn. I've toyed with trying to see if it's worth the extra page hits to do a commentary game and post it on youtube, with comments from my editors or something. We could always use the extra traffic, but I really don't know. My editors monitor the combined traffic for our site, and it is very clear that we get traffic from people who go back and look at even our old reviews. Both my editors and I feel this is because the demographic we represent prefers us to be less mainstream and more thinking oriented. Our readers are the kind of gamers that might go and purchase a 5 year old game if we said it was great. Would we lose that with a short-term boost gained from posting preview videos that hype upcoming products? I dunno. It's a thorny issue. Trolls I can handle, but the last thing I ever want to do is be called an industry shill and then say to myself, "Maybe they are right. Look at what I did when game X came out."