Games Journalism 2017: Gaming news in a post-truth world

Telltale did too much mediocre stuff lately and their games probably are not selling as well. The Walking Dead 1 was great. The Wolf Among Us was downright brilliant. Borderlands was quite neat.

Then things started to fade a bit. TWD 2 was not as good as #1 and #3 by all accounts is significantly worse. Batman was mediocre. GoT was mixed. Others, like Michonne, were worse. Their quality really dropped off while working on projects for some pretty high licensing cost properties. Even though both GoT and Batman were in my wishlist, I never bought them given the rather tepid reviews.

If they slow down their production and go back to making more compelling stories, I think they will rebound nicely. If not, they will not be in business.

I guess everyone’s going to have their own take on the specifics, but I’ve been generally pretty satisfied with Telltale’s recent output. I recently played TWD 3 and I thought it was pretty good, about even with the second season though both aren’t as great as the first, it’s true. But Batman, that’s a seriously cool little story they’ve put together. Not much of a game, but then you knew it was a Telltale game when you picked it up right? And I liked Michonne, that was a kind of tightened-up mini season of TWD, focused more on action (read: QTEs) and not a bad little time waster. Oddly enough, everyone on the internet seems to think The Wolf Among Us was a staggering work of genius and I thought it was just ok. Kind of clever I guess, in a stick-fables-into-modern-day premise, but the stuff I liked about it, playing gumshoe, was relatively shallow. But again, I mean it’s Telltale, that’s just how they roll these days.

I don’t think Telltale releasing so many different games in a short period of time could be considered “saturating the market” in the same way as, say, Activision releasing six separate Guitar Hero games in one year, for the simple reason that many of the franchises Telltale has had access to attract radically different audiences. It’s unreasonable to expect someone who liked The Walking Dead to automatically be onboard for Tales from the Borderlands or Guardians of the Galaxy, or for most of their existing audience to be interested in Minecraft: Story Mode.

Seriously, the “just watch on YouTube” aspect cannot be ignored. You can look up a given Telltale series and find numerous videos of full individual episodes or ten-hour supercuts, often with millions of views each. The Telltale model makes casual piracy too easy, and it’s hard to argue that high-profile YouTube channels like Jacksepticeye posting full playthroughs of these games is going to somehow boost sales.

That’s true too, the lack of very much gameplay at all means once you’ve seen the story there’s no real reason to play for yourself. Unless you just really want to make your own choices.

Matisse:

Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation. When we go into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sculpture rooms in the Louvre and look, for example, at a Puget, we can see that the expression is forced and exaggerated to the point of being disquieting. It is quite a different matter if we go to the Luxembourg; the attitude in which the sculptors catch their models is always the one in which the development of the members and tensions of the muscles will be shown to greatest advantage. And yet movement thus understood corresponds to nothing in nature: when we capture it by surprise in a snapshot, the resulting image reminds us of nothing that we have seen. Movement seized while it is going on is meaningful to us only if we do not isolate the present sensation either from that which precedes it or that which follows it.

These are example videos of content generated for peanuts. My job is to create chaos.

Hey, this Mattese guy is fun!

I never did the YouTube thing but I find the episode approach to be highly undesirable. I didn’t like the way Kings Quest came out for that reason too and I used to love King’s quest. Episodic is a major turn-off from my POV.

Episodic content is just a worse version of a season pass, so you’ll hear no argument from me on that front…but a single release would arguably be worse for business than the current model, because everything is in front of players (or YouTube viewers) at once, and there’s not nearly as much discussion or speculation about what’s going to happen next, which helps sell further episodes.

I’ve made my peace with episodic releases. In fact in some cases, like with Telltale’s Batman game, it makes sense. Kind of feels like getting a comic book each month. But most of the time I just wait until all episodes are out then buy the whole thing. Upside is it’s often a little cheaper at that point.

TRUTH.

But most of the time I just wait until all episodes are out then buy the whole thing.

Also truth. The game-buyer’s paradox, the customer that can wait the longest after release gets the better experience.

Episodic content can be amazing in the right circumstances.

For example, look at last year’s Hitman. With previous Hitman games, they’d include a bunch of levels right from the outset, and I’d just move from level to level without really experimenting with each.

But in the way they released each level once every month or two, it incentivized fully exploring each level. And IO took full advantage of each level too by introducing all sorts of objectives and variations to enable these really detailed places to reach their full potential.

They also were genuinely able to improve subsequent levels by learning what worked and what didn’t work in previous levels, both in the constraints of their engine, and in what gamers liked or didn’t like for each.

I’ve been waiting for years to buy Kentucky Route Zero when it’s complete.

related to Teiman’s videos: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

In light of Disney’s short-lived ban on the L.A. Times access to their upcoming films, which was overturned when various critics and journalists vowed to stop covering Disney films in solidarity, Jason Schreier wonders if anyone in the games media will ever ask Pete Hines on the record about Bethesda’s Kotaku ban.


That letter is a treasure. I hope you dig it. It rewards close reading. When you get one of the greatest artists who has ever lived in full flow like this , well, its a gift. Enjoy!

Good news! I just got a response from Bethesda regarding games journalism!

https://img.memecdn.com/no-fucks-given_o_2278227.jpg

LOL! :)

Ugh.

Well, like the article says, at least they don’t have any pay to win schemes in their games (yet). As long as I can ignore the loot boxes and still get to experience expansive single player worlds, I’m all for whales chipping in to pay for it.

If it was just experience enhancement, I’d be ok with it. But my fear is that this will go the way of mobile phone gaming, where the game is all about whale-harvesting and hiring teams of experts to figure out just the right curve to exploit the psyche into paying more, more, more.

I had forgotten it, but back in 2013, the “analysts” were very dismissive of the new console launches, figuring that they had been supplanted by newer gaming platforms such as mobile. But the consoles sold plenty and went on to market success, because there is a continuing market for traditional console gaming. And the last thing I want to see is traditional console gaming turning into the wasteland of scummy exploits that is current FTP mobile gaming, but with a full-price buy in up front. I’ve messed with a couple in the last couple of months, and deleted them quickly when they became obviously exploitative.