Daily Video Game News Blog 09/03/20
First Entry
Hello there. This is just going to be a daily blog where I discuss new video games and news around the video game industry. Anyway, let’s get this started. Recently both Madden 21 and Marvel Avengers have released, and it seems that both of those games, as different as they are, have one very big thing in common, and that is that they are stuffed to the brim with live service garbage. The kind of grindy, daily mission crap that is designed to waste your time and keep you playing and hunting for more gear or better upgrades for your team all while offering you shortcuts that come by the way of paying actual money.
Is this surprising? No, not in the slightest. We knew that this was coming to Madden and have been dreading it since the release of the previous title. The fans have responded quickly as well. Making Madden 21 the most poorly rated game of ALL TIME on Metacritic at a 0.3 out of 100. Granted, as time goes by I am sure that the score will go up and Metacritic is far from the end all be all of review websites, but it does make me happy that gamers as a whole have responded with such anger at this move from Madden that there might be some actual hope for change. We might actually see some kind of improvement in the game’s mechanics or maybe a new developer takes the helm, since EA has been driving the game into the ground for YEARS now. Probably not.
As for Avengers, the writing on the wall for this game as a live service has been there since the initial announcement trailers. Yet, I am still saddened by it. I wanted this game to be good. It had such a strong marketable base to use and instead they created Avenger’s but Anthem. With their ridiculous monetization scheme of making EACH character a different battle pass for 10$ a pop is horrendous. I don’t care if it’s just cosmetics, normal games just give you that stuff for free. With cosmetics costing money, it creates a type of hierarchy in a game where people could be bullied for not having cosmetics on their characters. This game you will most likely be playing with your friends, but then you’ll have the incentive to buy skins to make your characters cool and in turn impress your friends.
Hiding content behind some lame, multiple currency purchase or some slog of repetitive challenges is not a game mechanic, it’s a marketing mechanic, created to exhaust you into spending your money on the game rather than just enjoying the gameplay. I really wish companies would learn that people just like playing good games and not games as a service and just put out decent games with good replay value and then maybe people will play it a lot.
There’s still a lot of promising games coming out like Cyberpunk and Psyconauts 2. Some games are coming out even sooner like the Tony Hawk remakes, and some are recently release like Wasteland 3, the spiritual successor of the original Fallout franchise. There is hope guys.
I feel like I am becoming one of those old cynical gamers that always complains about games nowadays being too complicated and older games much better. Hopefully that proves not true and the gaming industry learns from its mistakes in the past of being too greedy and realizing that it's us the fans they need to focus on and not their own pockets. Until, that day comes I will be here to make some snarky comment about how they could do better knowing full well that my opinion means nothing to them. Jeeze, this first entry is kinda dark. Well hopefully I have better news to talk about tomorrow. Thanks for reading!