How Video Game Companies Should Make Money: Why Modern Warfare 3 was a Bad Idea

With many major reviewers, the release of Modern Warfare 3 has earned a 'perfect' score. That's 100/100. However Metacritic finds users rating the game between 15 and 30%.

Much like the release of Dragon Age 2, many user reviews contain accusations of either trolling or fanboyism in other reviewers.

So why did Activision release a multiplayer game with the same features as its predecessor, built on the same engine?

This will sound stupid coming from me, but the problem is that Activision doesn't know how to make money. Let me clarify: their method of making money will result in the degradation of their brand. Clearly they can make money. But will they keep making money?

Activision has chosen to make money by releasing a "new" product, which is in almost no way new. The jokes about re-used models, sounds, and even error messages are easy to make . . . but they aren't just jokes. MW 3, by most reports, is not a new game. It may be a fun game, and certainly enough people played MW2, and are already playing MW3, to argue that it is.

But players have paid $60 for something many see as worthless. Why should they do that? Why shouldn't that make them mistrust Activision?

If Activision wants to make money on a sequel, let them actually make a sequel. If Activision wants to make money on soda pop ad campaigns, let them do that. If they want to charge a monthly fee for access to high-quality low-lag dedicated server hosting, then great. Perhaps they'd like to charge for multiplayer access and keep the players excited with community events, themed game settings, and periodic releases of content like new maps. Maybe they want to sell decals, tattoos, special weapon skins, or even fancy . . . helmets . . . in a cash shop.

But charging your player base for a triple-A title and failing to deliver is not a good strategy. Maybe it's a good strategy for this fiscal quarter, but this time next year, Activision will hopefully know enough to regret it.

Call of Duty 8: Modern Warfare 3 Innovates and Alienates

  Wow. I'd like to say these first posts are awesome. They're the exact kinds of expressions I was hoping for; creative and insightful exercises in critical thinking (with maybe a touch of "We told you so.") Now, without tooting my own horn too loudly, I do most of the post editing, but I want to assure contributors and readers (however few) that the edits are strictly grammatical. I never tamper with ideas, which I hope explains the stream of consciousness writing without taking anything away from the authenticity.

  Anyway, on to the real topic. A recent article from IGN.com makes the outrageous claim that the latest Call of Duty iteration is the success of five specific innovations. Call me a hater, but this is just a godawful phony baloney statement. Ironically, these same five ideas are perfect descriptions of where the modern shooter has gone wrong. Each of these topics should have their own post here, so I'll try to be brief. "Here we look at some of the greatest innovations that were introduced or streamlined by the Call of Duty series..."

• RPG-elements in an FPS:

  The use of experience points to unlock features, weapons, and levels should not be considered an innovation simply for the fact that it's been done so many times before. I don't think it's been done quite as extensively as the Call of Duty series, but a system of addiction added into a game and calling it an innovation is over the top.

  These unlockable elements used to be granted through accomplishing something in the game, rather than being ground out through kills and killstreaks. Beating a certain level, or finding a secret area would grant you a new aspect of the game. Gaining these rewards for kills and objectives which you have to do anyway doesn't carry the same weight. It makes for a hollow experience and holds the best parts just over the player's head, just to get them to sit down and play a few more games whether they like to or not.

• Customization: 

    This doesn't even compute. Do they think having a wide variety of weapons and accessories is novel? Apparently. This customization system erodes aspects of teamplay as "there's no longer any need to choose from the static set of pre-made soldier classes". In games of yore, those premade classes were good at what they did and didn't require improvement or modification. They were a tool employed by the skills of the player. Allowing players to change that alters the balance of the game through the developers' lack of foresight or care. They can't possibly see how players might use these modifications in the future. They might have a designed a cookie-cutter system, where everyone only uses the modifications that have been proven effective, with no deviation. 

  The existence of a customization system seems only fitting for a game that places so much emphasis on 'leveling up' and gaining new equipment. It dovetails nicely with the addictive component of RPG-elements. There's always that new thing to get, just up ahead. I only need 10,000 more points. One more hour, mom, please?

  Why not give all players access to these unlocks except for a rare few ones that have to be found in the singleplayer, or achieved by some other means? Because that might require more work by the designers and time is money. It would also destroy the experience point system, and the next 'innovation'.

• RPG-elements in an FPS 2:

    Yes, indeed. Once I've reached max level in a video game, I like to turn it off and start over whether I'm finished or not just so I can tell my friends how cool I am. This delightful Call of Duty innovation comes in the form of resetting your unlocks and stats back to basics, allowing you to play through the whole experience some more. The handy icon lets other people know that you're a super cool guy who's up to the challenge of kicking himself in the nutbag.
    I don't know why this is an innovation. It's certainly not one that I care to have any part of. It's another system of fooling the player into having fun, without worrying whether or not the game itself is worthy of it.

• Killstreaks:

  Here's a good one. The game rewards players who make many kills in a row by use of special-use items which allow them to kill even more people. Sure, that's innovative. But rewarding a player for multiple kills isn't. A little game called Unreal Tournament came out in 1999, you should look it up. Of all the things that game is memorable for, the kill streak announcer is the best.

  The problem with these, again, is that it ruins balance and continues the erosion of teamplay mechanics. There's no incentive to help your team if you're too busy trying for that Chopper Gunner killstreak. Rewarding players who are already doing well is somewhat of a problem, too, but for different reasons. A good Quake II player would almost certainly know where the Quad Damage spawns and be able to access it readily. However, a shitty player would also have a chance to grasp it and perhaps level the field for a few seconds. Not so in the increasingly innovative and daring Call of Duty.

• Social Network Integration:

  Don't make me say it.

  God. Dammit. 

  Facebook is horrible. Social networking (inside the internet) is horrible. It's not personable, it's not real, and most of all, it doesn't fucking matter. It's the internet, and nothing matters on the internet.

  That being said, social network integration in a video game is probably the worst step you could take in any direction. According to IGN, this new feature for the upcoming Call of Duty title will have online stat tracking for multiple games, video guides, dynamic match analysis, clan features, and real life prizes! Hory shet. Let me get my wallet because something this good can't be free!

  And it isn't. For full access to these features, which use social networking, on the internet, in addition to other fees, rates, and terms, including but not limited to XBox Live, you must pay nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, American. Keep in mind that you can get all this information, for free, online already. Stat tracking has been around forever. Youtube has your videos. You can watch the pros play online, too. You can make a clan website. You can go to the store and buy something nice for yourself for nine ninety-nine rather than hope you get a real life prize from this deal.

It's basically the monetization of information. What they've 'innovated' is a new delivery method. This crap costs them literally pennies a day. Yet if everyone who buys Call of Duty 8 also pays this fee, they stand to make buckets of your money. And that's just not right. Not for this game, not for any game. Unfortunately, "it could really revolutionize the way developers approach the multiplayer experiences in their games" in a bad way.

  The list is far from complete, but if they'd asked me why old generation gamers don't appreciate these new 'streamlined' and 'socially integrated' 'innovations', I would've told 'em.

Red Orchestra 2, or how Call of Duty ruins everthing

Most people didn't really care for Red Orchestra: Ostfront.

By most accounts it was clunky, boring, frustrating, and frequented by an alarming number of Nazi apologists. However, that didn't matter to some. For them, it succeeded in occupying a space that few games dared. It was historically accurate and realistic without overstepping its bounds and reaching into simulation territory. Compared to its peers, it took ages to stand back up from prone position, it used iron sights before they were vogue, and carrying more than one gun didn't even make sense. The game stood for something. It was idealistic. You were a soldier on the Eastern front of World War II, nothing more. You didn't get to play the hero character, kicking down doors and mowing down a room full of Nazi's with a gun that was more akin to a bullet hose than piece of wood and metal.

Let's list some of the things that made Red Orchestra unique (and probably hated by most gamers):

• You got one gun. Most of the time it was a bolt action rifle.
• Automatic vs semi-automatic vs bolt action played a huge role. Bolt actions had the greatest range while the sub-machine guns kicked like a mule and were pointless to use beyond certain ranges. Semi-autos effectively filled the gap; they lacked the long-range accuracy of the bolt actions and the close-range rate of fire of the SMGs. Weapon choice had a huge impact on playstyle. Rifle users traded pot shots at range while the SMGs wove through cover to try and get in range to mop up behind the lines or dominate the close quarters zones.
• Guns felt substantial. When you cycled the bolt on a Mosin Nagant, it really felt like you were winding up for your next shot. It clicked satisfyingly into place, and it never seemed like a rhythmic animation cycle as in most games.
• Aiming: When you brought up your iron sights, your sight picture was what you expected it to be. There was no zoom, no player aids of any kind. The effect of this was to lengthen the battlefield and make aiming at long range a challenge.

• Gun sway was also important. If you were standing and out of breath from a long sprint your chances of hitting anything past 10 feet were slim to none. Not only was this realistic, it slowed the game down. This is extremely important to why RO felt so special. There was a trade-off between moving quickly to seize an advantageous position versus staying prone in cover and being able to fire more accurately. While you could run through a close quarters environment with an SMG and spray from the hip successfully, the moment you tried to do this anywhere else you would be quickly dispatched by a clever rifleman. This created an inherent system of balance by the fact that the players accepted the natural imbalance of being in an unfavorable situation. Everybody was cool with the fact that SMGs dominated in close quarters battle while the riflemen dominated the long distance battle.
• The maps were also fantastic. Most were huge, sprawling affairs that were painful to traverse unless you hopped in a troop transport. Usually, infantry were involved in firefights at closer ranges while tanks traded punches overhead from across the map. You really felt like you were involved in a battle.
• Vehicle combat was also true enough to real life, yet intense in its simplicity.
• Beyond all these elements of realism, it was fun.

Intensity, I believe, is the pervading idea that is critical to Red Orchestra's success. It is intense because the slow pace of the game, the feeling of vulnerability, and the lack of armament all succeed in placing the player very distinctly in the game world. Feeling like you're part of a world that makes sense, or is at least internally consistent is critical to immersion and that feeling of intensity that all RO players have come to love and expect.

That brings us to Heroes of Stalingrad.

It's a game that was eagerly anticipated for years by a devoted community who kept the original fresh with new maps for years after its initial release. I almost always had to wait in line to get into one of the few popular servers up until RO2 launched, seven years late. What everyone expected and was looking forward to was a game that took the lessons from RO1 and expanded and improved upon them. What we got was a game that tried to be two very different things.

It's clear that Tripwire were at least listening to their community for some part of the development process, as many of Ostfront's lessons were translated into the sequel. The guns still feel like real guns, the new graphics have succeeded in (superficially) increasing immersion as the levels look great, and you still feel quite vulnerable when you're sprinting across an open field towards cover. On the surface, the game does a good job of updating some of the core gameplay features of the original. Once the honeymoon is over, however, some ugly decisions start to become very apparent. Now when you bring up your iron sights, there is a significant zoom; spotting players and shooting them at range is much easier. Recoil is drastically reduced for SMGs. It was always over the top in RO1, but I always felt it helped with balance. I would have been happy with a little less recoil in HOS, but as it currently stands, it's very easy to score kills with SMGs at 100+ yards. Along with the fact that there are now significantly more automatic and semi-automatic due to changes to the role selections, RO2 now feels much less unique, and much less tactical. It has lost the clear distinction between playstyles because with the current map selections, there is really no reason to choose rifleman. With SMGs being much more accurate, and semi-auto rifles being about as accurate as the bolt actions, there is no reason to choose a bolt other than pride. Sure, I'm still able to score very well in matches with a bolt, but I still know that I would be able to be doing just as well or better with another weapon. It feels like they tried to smooth over the differences between the guns so that everybody could feel successful in a greater handful of situations, and in doing so, they have destroyed an important element that makes RO unique.

These are not the only examples of making Red Orchestra easier, or more friendly to newer gamers. Your stamina level now has comparatively little impact on your aiming ability, and firing while standing up is now significantly easier. It also takes less time to bring up your iron sights. I don't know if they just decided that waiting to catch your breath before trying to take your shot was frustrating for newer players, but all these changes combined have vastly increased the speed at which combat takes place in RO. One of the reasons I loved the original was because I was not the best twitch gamer, and if I came around a corner slowly and ran into someone sprinting towards me, I was going to have the upper-hand in quickly aiming and shooting them before they could come to a stop and shoulder their weapon. There is almost no penalty now for doing this; SMGs can now sprint through buildings, pause momentarily to blast enemies, and then quickly move on. This systematic removal of penalties and trade-offs makes the game feel suspiciously more like the modern, smoothed-over, highly-polished, and shallow shooters like Call of Duty. And we haven't even gotten to the "unlock" system yet.

I could dedicate a whole new post to this epidemic of "progression" that is taking over gaming (and I probably will), but I'm more concerned right now with how it has corrupted my beloved Red Orchestra. Ostfront was a game the prided itself on its historical accuracy. The guns were accurately modeled and realistically distributed. Most troops had bolt action rifles, and the more complex and expensive-to-manufacture SMGs, MGs, and anti-tank weapons were few and far between (a team of 50 typically had 4-6 SMGs total, depending on the map, with at least half the team being bolt actions. In RO2, less than a third have rifles). Heroes of Stalingrad has now suffered the indignity of having an unlock and progression system shoehorned into it. Now you have to unlock your bayonet if you're a rifleman (who didn't pre-order the game), get reduced recoil if you level up your MP41, and unlock what should have been exceptionally rare or experimental weaponry. For a historical game, this is utter garbage. I cannot think of a game less-suited for this level of transparent manipulation and pandering. RO doesn't need new and exciting weaponry to unlock to keep it interesting. It never needed it in the past and it sure as heck doesn't need it now.

It won't be long now until everyone has unlocked everything and the game is even faster and easier for everybody. Before long it will be just that much closer to Call of Duty. I can see exactly how and why this has happened. Gaming has become more popular, and has attracted a wider audience who are not interested in playing good, interesting, or original games. No, they are merely interested in a cinematic experience and having minor, meaningless goals to work towards. The kind of people that love Call of Duty games, basically. Tripwire tried to double-dip. They tried to make their game attractive to these new gamers, while retaining their fans who loved the unique, tense gameplay of their original creation. In the end, they succeeded in merely watering down the ideas that made the original so successful, losing the support and trust of a huge part of their fans, and further botching the launch by annoying people with a non-functioning stat tracking system. And for all that, the game is still maintaining shockingly low numbers of players at peak times. Significantly fewer still than Killing Floor, their last game, now several years old. So they've alienated their biggest, most dedicated fans and still managed to fail to attract the shitty CoD fanbase, who were never going to play the game anyway with such upcoming titles as Battlefield 3 and MW3. I guess they thought selling out would be worth it for the extra pre-orders from people who wanted a game to hold them over until the next big thing. It remains to be seen how well this will work out for them in the future.

However, I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy Heroes of Stalingrad. I still feel that it's the best first-person shooter since its predecessor, and it has retained enough of that feeling of intensity that I love playing it. I can't help but feel that it could just be so much better if it were closer to Ostfront. I loathe seeing the influence that Call of Duty has had on the development of the game, but at the same time, I am confident that it won't be long before servers will be able to tweak the game to be closer to its roots. I'm just bitter that it's now fallen on the community to rescue the game from the developers, and that I can no longer count Tripwire among the few developers who are committed to strong game design first and mass appeal second.

So let's talk about video games.

I was excited for the release of Sword of the Stars 2: Lords of Winter, due to my enjoyment of the first set of installments. I'm also unhappy with the direction the larger companies have taken in video gaming recently, so small studios like Kerberos appeal to me. After waiting a year from first reading that a second game would be made, I pre-ordered and got back into the hype machine, looking up all the material I could.

Though I didn't wade through all the game lore, of which an impressive amount had been made, the developers' videos and other commentary encouraged me. I was and am happy for its release on Steam. I even expected to not actually be able to play the game for a week after its actual release, just going by the industry's trend recently. I can't say I'm happy that's the way things are - with companies releasing unfinished products - but that's an issue I'll probably write about later.

What I'm here to write about this time is simpler than that. Achievements. A friend of mine noticed the Steam achievements for Sword of the Stars II and commented "I wasn't aware playing the game was an achievement". He was referring to the fact that 7 of the 11 'achievements' in the game are for things that you did as a matter of course in almost every game of the first SotS series. It's a good point.

Let me be clear, I'm not saying this is the biggest issue. If you preordered the game like me, especially on Steam where the wrong build was apparently released (deja vu, Steam), you know that the devs have worse problems right now than lame achievements. I'm not going to comment on those issues, I don't know enough about the problems right now, and like I said, that's tied into other issues I'm not going to address yet. What I will say is this: if the devs had the time to write in a couple achievements to fulfill the duty that every game apparently has now, why not come up with some that mean something? Was it hard to come up with them? Here, I'll do it now:

-Take control of 5 asteroid monitors in one game

-Destroy 10+ enemy ships in one battle without losing any of your own

-Kill a hiver gate in a system before any gate deploys in that system

-Win a battle with only planet defense missiles

-Kill 50 drones without PD researched

-Colonize a formerly enemy colony while it still has more than 90% infrastructure

-Gain 2,000,000 treasury in one game from commerce raiding alone

-Shoot down a torpedo warhead with ballistic weapons fire

-Win a game in less than 100 turns

-Win a game in more that 300 turns

Et cetera. Some achievements should be hidden from the player, some should be shown, like goals in a tutorial. This is off the top of my head. This is not to say there aren't any good achievements on the list - building an original Sword of the Stars model dreadnought is a nice bit of nostalgia, and researching the xombie plague is probably good to encourage players to try out that bio weapons tree. But if Kerberos had asked me "Should we half-ass this achievements thing, or just not do it until we want to actually do it?", then I would have told them.