Grumpy gamer rants

Sometimes I have an opinion about gaming, gamers, or the industry that gets a bit spicy.

Dragon age companions
Grumpy gamer rants

No, Dragon Age Veilguard is not ‘woke’

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Gamers are not in any way a uniform community: I would argue that, like a lot of ‘geek’ pastimes, one of the key characteristics of the gaming community is acceptance of differences. But sometimes I have to wave my fist at elements of the gaming fandom that I just think don’t belong. Today is one of those times.

There is a small group of loud and obnoxious ‘gamers’ who seem to be having a moment lately. These are the toxic cousins to the unpleasant gatekeepers who pose purity tests for anyone who wants to call themselves a fan. I’m talking now about the bigots and haters who don’t want people different than them represented in games. They often shout “Woke!” at any game that tries to be inclusive, and frankly I’m sick and tired of them.

One of their latest targets is an upcoming game called Dragon Age: the Veilguard. The game hasn’t even shipped yet, and a certain group is dumping hatred on it for the fact it doesn’t strictly represent straight white men in the role of ‘hero’. The ‘controversy’ is so loud that a developer often credited with creating the original series, David Gaider, has felt compelled to call the noisy weirdos out. In a world with fewer asshats, he wouldn’t feel a response was necessary.

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Grumpy gamer rants

PC Gamer jumps the shark, fires columnists

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I have been a subscriber to PC Gamer magazine for six or seven years now. I have enjoyed the magazine: its humour, the generally well thought out reviews of computer games, and most especially the regular columns by people like Andy Mahood and Desslock (Stefan Janicki). I could rely on these industry observers to give me something enjoyable to read whenever the games being reviewed failed to interest me… which was more often than not. Each of these writers focused on genres: RPGs, Simulations, First Person Shooters, and so on: I could get reasonably intelligent snapshots of entire industry segments from these folks.

In the April issue of PC Gamer, the new “Editor in Chief”, Gary Steinman, announced the end of the “back of the magazine” columnists. In a failed attempt to be humorous, Mr. Steinman described those who enjoyed these sections as expressing some sort of defect, reading the “wrong” parts of the magazine instead of the stuff he deems “interesting”. Any marginally competent editor would have actually surveyed some readers to see what they actually, oh, I don’t know, enjoyed about the magazine? That might have been wise, but Mr. Steinman didn’t do this.

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Grumpy gamer rants

WoW must be giving it away…

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I was reading a “d’uh, that’s obvious” article today regarding how the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) industry needs to stop looking for the next WoW killer. And I came across this particular bit of text that, well, just doesn’t add up.

By his [Michael Cai] estimation, WoW accounted for half of the $860 million in revenues that MMOs generated in the U.S. in 2008.    

The emphasis above is mine. Let’s take a look at this figure.
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Grumpy gamer rants

The failure of the PC Game industry…

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Game developers for the personal computer are becoming scarce. More and more developers are changing their focus to develop console games- games for the XBox 360, PS3, Wii, and so on. Many of the games that make it to the PC are low-quality “ports” of games that were first release months or years earlier on the console.

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Grumpy gamer rants

MMOGs: we grind because we love it

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Grinding: all massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have it. Some more than others, but it is always there. Go forth and slay 50 rats. Collect 10 copper pieces, 32 rat pelts, 19 rat tails. Turn in same. Repeat 245 times. Graduate to killing skeletons. Repeat 895 times. Ding! You leveled! Now go forth and slay 2,655 ghouls…. It is like factory work, but without the pay cheque. In fact, we actually pay someone else for the privilege of doing this, and call it “entertainment”.

You’d think we’d hate it, that these types of games would never catch on, yet tens of millions of players log in every day, strap on their virtual swords, and head out to slay another few thousand denizens of the countryside in pursuit of the elusive level. Every new massively multiplayer online game that comes out perpetuates the grinding “feature”. It is weird, doubly so because I seem to be afflicted by the same behavioral quirk as all the millions of people playing MMOGs. There has to be some reason why…

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Grumpy gamer rants

Checkpoint saves suck

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From time to time I feel compelled to preface a posting here by a reminder of what sort of person I am.  I’ve been playing computer and console games for over a quarter of a century, heavily biased towards the computer “role playing” game, fantasy, and first person shooter genres.  I’m more prone to like something like Deus Ex or Oblivion than Doom 3, although I enjoy both types of games.  And Mario Kart or Katamari Damacy are right out. 

In a nutshell, I like games with a strong narrative: something that could make a decent fantasy or science fiction book.  Although I enjoy some twitch/combat games, that isn’t my forte.  “Childlike” games with bubblegum graphics and mostly mindless plots do not amuse me very much.

Now I’ve set the stage for my rant, the basic thesis of which is: Checkpoint saves and their cousins, single copy saves, are evil.  They suck.  They drain all of the joy out of otherwise good games.

This requires a bit of explaining if you aren’t a computer gamer…

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Grumpy gamer rants

I’m a bad, baaad gamer…

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I decided to play a little bit of Lego Star Wars II tonight.   It’s a cute game, essentially a “platformer” with very prettily rendered 2.5d graphics.  That one sentence summary is doing the game a disservice- it’s quite large and reasonably faithfully reproduces the stories from the original three Star Wars movies, albeit with a humourous/comical twist. 

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