Competition; it’s hard-wired into many of us at a biological level. Everything we do has a competitive edge, whether it is immediately obvious or not. This has never been more true than in gaming, and more specifically, online gaming.
This is very much a moment for me to through some things floating around my head onto the site and to give a little bit of an insight into how I at least do interviews for The Reticule and why I do them like I do. This very much is a result of reading Alec Meer’s tremendous conversation with Ken Levine, the man behind BioShock: Infinite on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Here is Part One and Part Two. Read them, then come back to this.
A large gun, and an area full of people in front of me. In any other genre, there may be some hope of conversation, perhaps a spot of exploring, even. But no, this is a first-person-shooter and all must die. Hesitate, and you either die, riddled with bullets and with a screen full of jam, or the game simply shouts at you and forces a restart regardless.
This isn’t a problem, financially, for many developers and publishers. This is the norm; this is what people expect from a modern FPS and if it wasn’t full-on, balls-to-the-wall bullet-action, fans would be disappointed. Provided it has a pedigree – Call of Duty, Halo, or any number of yearly spin-offs – it will make oodles of cash one way or another, so what’s the problem?
It’s all getting very boring indeed.
As we get ever closer to possible reveals of the next generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft at E3 this Summer, musings about the future of the console market are bound to crop up here and there. The first sign of the changes to business of how we pay for consoles emerged yesterday with Microsoft launching a new bundle in the US where you get a 4GB 360 with Kinect for an initial fee of $99, with a two-year…
This was originally intended to be a disclaimer at the beginning of my Rage review, but it spiralled out of control and now takes the form of an editorial about journalistic objectivity and the relationship gamers have with developers, thus ends the disclaimer to the disclaimer.