October 31, 2023

Cease Your Expectations

What does a game owe us?

What exactly makes a game "worth it?" You might answer with something like" oh, when it's good" or "if I had a good time" but even those kinds of answers tend to be pretty vague and personal. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of answers of course, but in terms of criticism or consensus, they're not very fruitful. Which is a real problem when the medium's biggest press outlet decides to only use that kind of analysis. 

"Baldur's Gate 3 is Causing Some Developers to Panic" is an opinion piece that was published on IGN on August 10ᵗʰ1 and it has been haunting my brain ever since. The video features Twitter Blue subscriber Destin Legarie heavily editorializing tweets from developers in response to the then release of Baldur's Gate 3 that cautioned about using that particular game as a raised standard for other games. To quote Legarie: "Why shouldn't customers have raised standards? To take it even further, why shouldn't AAA developers raise their own standards?" The video rubbed me the wrong way instantly, in some part because there is a point to be made here about the current business state of game development. Legarie falls to make this point in any tangible way, of course, instead weirdly zeroing in on a thread by indie developer Xalavier Nelson Jr. (never sharing full context, naturally) and using several examples of less than savory choices by other games as an example of the industry white never highlighting anything Larian Studios specifically did differently.

Frankly the video's bad and Legarie got rightfully cooked by a much better critic2 than I, so this is not a specific rebuttal. Instead, I present it as a case study for our expectations and what makes a game "good." In the case of the IGN video, the ultimate quality marker seems to be that Baldur’s Gate 3 was good and players aren't mad at it, so that is all other games need to do. That doesn't exactly say much, does it? Sure, Baldur's Gate 3 released feature complete but that's only true for the players who didn't subsidize the game's development via early access purchases. There's no microtransactions, true, but is that only why everyone clung to it? Can't be because there weren't any technical issues, given that every character being down bad turned out to be a huge bug.3 Based on the tone of the piece, I believe that the argument that Destin is making is that Baldur's Gate 3 is successful because it delivered good customer service.

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For most readers, the phrase "customer service" rightfully evokes shudders, but for clarity: the customer is not always right. In fact, the customer is infamously fickle in the game space. I just rolled credits on Sony's Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (review to come on InBetweenDrafts) which took me about 25-28 hours of gameplay to do, only to find that this was apparently cause for concern among players. Getting the Platinum trophy (a full 100 % completion) was estimated at 30 hours by a leaker and this was considered terrible by this particular segment and at the risk of yucking someone's yum, I have no idea what exactly Insomniac was supposed to do here. Would tacking on another 30 to 60 hours of bulk just to satisfy achievement hunters sight unseen? Does that make Spider-Man 2, a game that already expanded its map, playable characters, mechanics, and more; a better game to actually play?

Consider my previous blog regarding the real source of the console wars; in which I argued that such debate isn't really about any particular quality and more about self justification. Games aren't cheap either, but they do have an artistic element that hardware design does not. The reasons why Spider-Man 2 is only 30ish hours are various and could have been impacted by anything from creative vision to logistics. In any case, decisions were made to try to make the game the team at Insomniac wanted to, not something made to order. A video game is not a hamburger and the audience has got to move past treating it that way.

That doesn't mean that things like monetization and performance cannot be vectors for criticism, but those need to be couched in the context of the game in question. Too often, players are coming to a tithe's counter and expecting to submit a list of expectations and get back the game of their dreams instead of looking for anything resembling a surprise. Arceus help Team Cherry if Hollow Knight: Silksong comes out and isn't eight times as big as the first game even though the original had tons of post-release updates to get there. The fallout could be radioactive.

What can we do about this? On the top end, not much - AAA publishers are never guiltless and all these expectations came from somewhere. There will always be Destins as long as there's money too, trying to moneyball art rather than engage with it. However, we don't have to play their games. The indie scene can always offer a refuge, but this requires a lot more ambition than we all often put forth. Yeah, play Vampire Survivors, it's great, but how in the hell is there so little chatter about games like Cassette Beasts? How is it that an indie team finally made a Poké Clone that's as good as the actual Pokémon games and there's next to nothing taking up that easy bait? As for the AAA space itself, while I realize it's a bit hypocritical having just discussed Spider-Man 2, but have we all considered just, y' know, not buying them right away? The discourse could stand to not be compressed in between release dates, and you need room in your schedule for all those indies you picked up.

Case in point: I went from pre-purchasing the Final Fantasy XVI collector's edition to buying just the game months later on sale. FFXVI isn't Game of the Year material in either case, but I'm less inclined to be generally mad and able to actually think about what the game is rather than what I hoped. FOMO is a real doozy, but you can take the time - if only for a couple of games. Also, as I often advocate for, engage with criticism published days, weeks, even months after embargo. We all watched that hbomberguy Fallout video and it was over a decade late, we can wait for more healthy discussion.

While expectations can help make purchasing decisions, games shouldn't be reacted to like they forgot the mustard. What makes a game good isn't customer service. It takes things that can't be quantified on a spreadsheet matrix. Baldur's Gate 3 shouldn't be what every game is and asking for that isn't going to fix anything.

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It’s still Halloween as I write this and I’d be remiss to let the season go by without acknowledging the King of Halloween, Nick Lutsko. He’s been making special Halloween themed projects yearly for a bit now that range from fun to “what the fuck,” but last year’s “Incantations” arc is a personal favorite. Here’s the best of those for going straight for the “what the fuck,” ‘Familiar Song.’ (CW for blood and some unsettling imagery in this one)

No idea how this video about a Bakugan convention got recommended to me, but its ending is worth the watch.

I do not know enough to know how to solve the Middle East but I do know extermination is not an answer. I’ve signed the Writers Against the War on Gaza Statement of Solidarity and encourage you to visit https://ceasefiretoday.com/ for more resources to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza immediately.