Randomly Mine: November 21st, 2018

Priorities

Playing Mass Effect: Andromeda a thought occurred to me. The game addresses a lot of criticisms regarding aspects from past entries and iterates on things previously dropped entirely by design or technical restrictions.

The Nomad is the most obvious example bringing back the concept of a Mako without entirely redesigning the vehicle like the Hammerhead in ME2, simply adding proper physics and pathways making the vehicle fun to use. 

Mineral scanning from ME2 had vanished in the trilogy's finale relegating those assets and mechanics to side-quests. But Andromeda brings the concept back by integrating the minerals into more than planet scanning, making it both easier and more rewarding.

Even the combat doesn’t follow the cliché of pressing A to take cover and centering your screen on thing you want dead; it features dozens of powers, combos, and multiple ways to elegantly and quickly traverse.

There’s plenty of things this game does, and yet it’s disliked by many, and there’s a good reason.

Mass Effect could’ve been improved by a Mako that wasn’t made of rubber, removing planet-scanning tedium, and avoiding bog-standard cover based shooting.

But those are not the reason people played Mass Effect.

I think when developing a game, it’s best to be honest about why people are coming to it. As my community video described, games can attract lots of different people for different reasons, but you will see something connecting the great majority of them.

While I’m sure they exist, I doubt there’s a large population of people that love Halo but hate its core-gameplay loop. I don’t think there are Warframe buffs that play it at the pace of Gears of War. And I don’t think Mass Effect fans had not one character they cared about.

That’s the bottom the line. Andromeda can address and even improve aspects of the game, but it ultimately won’t matter to the majority of players if the core those improvements are supposed to enhance is lacking.

Jealously

I’m not a Hitman fan.

I don’t dislike the games, I played Blood Money and generally enjoyed it but I didn’t grow up on the series nor follow it closely.

But it’s developer IO Interactive managed to survive Square Enix’s departure and release a direct follow up to their 2016 reboot and everybody I talk to is loving the hell out of it. Featuring amazing levels, ways to kill, and ways to play.

Not only that, but ways to buy.

Being an iterative sequel built upon the reboot's foundations, the original levels can be played on it too and without any extra cost to people that already own it. This is something I believe should’ve been standardized a long time ago when it comes to these types of sequels. Ones that run on the same engine and repeat many assets but with a few adjustments that make the experience that much more enjoyable.

Too bad it’s happening to a series I’ve yet to catch up on.

Much like XCOM.

That game does so many things properly it sickens me, because the one thing I happen to utterly despise about it is the core-gameplay that makes me want to tear my skin off.

Meanwhile it’s got built-in mod support, vast customization, great replay value, variety, and enough personalization to make everyone’s game feel like their own.

I envy all of you that like these games, you're lucky.

Censorship

You know, I kind of feel for Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege team. Probably not for long, I’m sure I’ll go back to ranting about their decisions on Twitter in the near future, but at this moment, I don’t envy their position.

For those that don’t know, the company made a recent post revealing that they were going to make adjustments to cosmetics on the game’s maps so that they only had to be tested once regardless of region.

But this isn’t how they revealed it.

They made a blog-post saying the game was going to be making “aesthetic adjustments” to fit within “asia’s gaming market” to make “one global version.”

Except aesthetic adjustments were censorship of elements that don’t within one country’s law, as everyone knew that the term “Asia’s gaming market” was really just code for China.

To make matters worse the “one global version” was confirmed within days to not be accurate by Ubisoft developers, making one wonder who on earth wrote this blog-post destined to anger and misinform players.

Well, this will all be a part of the game’s history as Ubisoft has now said they’re reverting all of the cosmetic changes made to the maps and HUD and will go on to make these changes exclusive to China and nowhere else in the world.

Only Ubisoft made this decision in the first place to lower their work load, and now they’re going to have to meet said workload in a shorter time frame than what would’ve originally been charted out.

I think this should be an example of how good communication isn’t just for good PR, but it can potentially impact the rest of your team and workforce.

One last thing on this topic.

I boot up my Twitter page and see a few pro players getting angry about not being able to play on all of the maps because of the decision to revert changes, and it’s all the fault of those angry people on reddit with their knee jerk reactions.

Then, the rest of the content is available on TS one day later…

When you’re mocking and/or blaming people for reacting immediately instead of giving it some time, don’t follow in their footsteps.