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Editorial: Don't Hate, Celebrate
No matter how crappy a game turns out to be, it should never be cause for celebration. Every game has potential within it, and every failure is a tragedy. If you're a Call of Duty fan, is your experience or the industry at large better if Battlefield comes out and objectively sucks? Of course not.
I'm sure I'll get accused of being a cheerleader for the industry instead of a proper critic for this, but I'd rather celebrate games than tear them down. That's why I'm in this business as a 30-year-old married dude with a mortgage and a car payment. I freaking love games. I love talking about them. I love writing about them. I love recommending obscure titles to people who would have never heard of them, much less considered purchasing. There's nothing more professionally fulfilling to me than seeing someone have a great time with a game that I recommended to them.
Of course, the flip side is that I have a responsibility to steer people away from the crap. Sometimes that's easy; it's not like I'm conflicted about writing a negative review of a cheap cash-in licensed game or a half-assed port. Other times it totally sucks, where a set of interesting ideas fail to come together into an entertaining whole.
Take Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter, for example. The concept for the game is ripped directly from the imagination of my ten-year-old self. The idea of a space empire game that allows just about every sweet political and military tactic I've read about in three decades of reading sci-fi novels gets my heart racing. Ambush an enemy fleet from behind a moon, broker secret alliances to secure the empire's borders, download skilled admirals into immortal computers to lead my fleets for eternity...the list goes on.
I gave the game a 3 out of 10. Not to mince words, but it is an unplayable mess right now. The review was unquestionably the right thing to do, but it doesn't make me feel any better. I've met the developers at Kerberos. They're nice guys – a bunch of Canadian nerds who love space empire sci-fi even more than I do. They believe passionately in their work. They're exactly the kind of team I love championing to the masses, pushing interesting concepts that the Activisions and EAs of the world wouldn't fund in a million years. And I warned everyone away from their new game, making it harder for this tiny indie developer to stay in business.
That sucks.
I threw Payday: The Heist under the bus not long before that after coming away from E3 and Gamescom this year with huge hopes for it. Cooperative shooting in a crime caper setting instead of the zombie apocalypse...heck yeah! But the PS3 version was in rough shape, particularly the lack of consideration given to the difference between gamepad and mouse/keyboard aiming. I dropped a 6.5 on that game, telling hundreds of thousands of possibly interested players to think twice about giving their money to a startup Swedish team with neat ideas and a passion for bringing something different to games.
That sucks.
I'm hardly unique; anyone who has been in this business long enough has a similar story or ten. The reality is that budgets get cut, features don't work out, bugs get missed, and plain old bad ideas make it into games. I understand that as well as anyone, but I don't have to be happy about it.
I'm obviously not going to stop handing out low scores to games that deserve them or recommend sub-par titles for the sake of being positive. Nor am I asking anyone to give problems, poor designs, or bugs a pass just because someone worked really hard on them. I guess I just wish that more folks approached playing a game (or reading a review) hoping to be impressed than expecting or even hoping for failure.
Sadistic applause of a critical bomb because a game isn't in their preferred genre, or is exclusive to the "wrong" platform, or just out of some need to feel superior drives me crazy. Don't hate the developer who worked 70-hour weeks because he could have squashed ten more bugs by working 80-hour weeks (which is a fallacy anyway). Celebrate the fact that there are talented folks out there working extremely hard on making every year in gaming better than the last, even if there are a few stumbles along the way.
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