Over the past few months we have seen a number of new games out, I mean actual new games rather than sequels to older games, such as Homefront, Bulletstorm, Dead Island and Rage. I can't talk for Rage as I have yet to play it but will do in the near future (probably christmas). Anyway even though each one of these games had rocky launches and lack luster reviews, they are pretty decent games. But as these are unknown titles the majority are more willing to automatically shun these games, while the likes of your CoDs and Battlefields among other well known titles I can't think of right now can get away with not so brilliant launches.
This mentality among gamers is wrong. If you are going to shun a game for a crappy launch, it should be done for every game. While I'm not saying everyone does this of course, there are a lot that do. I believe in the fact that not every game is going to have that perfect launch that they planned as mistakes happen, there's hardware issues, the list could go on. Dead Island is a perfect example of this, they had a terrible launch, especially their Steam launch (I'm still not sure how they ended up releasing the completely wrong version of the game but I'm not going to get in to that rant) but behind this crappy launch was infact a pretty awesome game. The point I'm getting to is you have to put faith in developers to fix problems when they occur, this is the exact reason patching of games was invented (along with with adding new content of course).
Along with that people these days seem a lot less forgiving with new titles than franchises. My theory on this is if we keep shunning new games the market won't change and get stale and we will be left with nothing but the same old generic game over and over. It is getting to that stage with shooters right now. There are many decent shooters out their but because they aren't Call of Duty they get completely over shadowed by months of advertising for the same game. Homefront is a prime example of this, the game in itself was a good game in it's own right and yes it had a bad start MP wise with server issues. But tell me other well known shooter franchises have never had problems at release. At the end of the day, they worked on it and sorted it out. The single player on the game was pretty good, the ending was a bit disapointing as it could have went on a bit longer, but it had an interesting storyline and decent gameplay.
Bulletstorm while it got over looked some what, it did have some momentum behind it but the hype about the game lasted ... well it didn't last. I'm sorry but that game put fun back in to games. Far to many games are trying to go all hollywood with their almost life like graphics and serious storylines. This game gave you guns put a load of enemies in your way and told you to go nuts. You could sit and complain about the storyline which I think was fairly decent, but it didn't really matter. The game focused on gameplay and I believe it truely pulled it off. Bulletstorm to me was a warm up for DNF. The only thing I didn't really like in the new Duke game was the fact you only got 2 weapons. Duke is supposed to have a massive arsenal of weapons. Putting that aside the game was fun.
It just seems people are far too cynical and unforgiving when it comes to games these days. If you don't get what I'm on about go read comments on damn near any review site and look at the amount of fanboys ripping on shit and abusive flame wars. There's always going to be the 'my dads harder than your dad' kind of flaming but people are generally full blown dicks these days. I am getting to the stage where I'm almost ashamed to call myself a gamer these days. Which is why I have moved away from the mainstream side of things and started to show smaller and indie games a lot more love. I for one would rather support developers with new original ideas even if they don't come across perfect over the franchises that chun out slightly tweaked games year after year. If you are going to update a game do it on your current game we don't need a yearly update for £40. Take Valve or Blizzard most of their games are old as balls but because of the support they have given their games over the years. People love them.
At the end of the day this industry needs innovation not repetition. Innovative ideas are rarely perfect on their first attempt which is why it keeps the industry moving. Games are supposed to be an investment, some thing that you can go back and play in a few months, years or even decades. There are games I still play from the days of early Nintendo and Sega, because they are good games. Will I be playing Black Ops 20 years from now? Probably not. I can't say for sure but I pretty certain I won't be. Half Life, Doom, Red Faction, Painkiller, Command & Conquer, all these games have been out for year yet I keep going back to them. Was it because they kept releasing pretty much the same games over and over? Hell no it wasn't. It was because they were creative and innovative would I enjoy them as much now if they were just a carbon copy of some other game? No. These games were not perfect, but they are great games so the flaws get over looked.
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