Calling out the haters
Before it becomes almost a month since I blogged last I decided to post a little rant here for all of you to enjoy now that I’m not so busy at work.
I was going to blog about this story about people protesting Dante’s Inferno (a new game based on the old stories) but then I found out it was all a PR stunt by the publisher, which I’m not sure is awesome or sad but should be commended as it got the game more press than anything else so far.
This post now will be concentrated on calling out the people in this news story (I apologize for anyone reading this and not interested in gaming but hopefully the rant is angry enough to give you something to be interested in).
Instead of just giving you a wall of text as to why this is moronic I’ve decided to to address each of the points one by one so here goes:
1. Significant content for L4D1 was promised, and never delivered
- Are you talking about content for the game or downloadable content for after release? Either way you are wrong. The game is multiplayer shooting so it wasn’t going to have a single player story and while there are only 4 campaigns you can play them Co-op or versus and they have almost infinite replay ability because of the AI director and the fact that you are playing with other people. Valve also just released an entire new mode not to long ago with a new map all for free. Most publishers don’t even think about doing this and start working on the next game right after the first one ships.
2. Valve put little faith in L4D1 since they almost certainly started working on L4D2 right after release
- See my previous point about them very recently bringing out a free add on for the game as well as frequent balance patches. If they didn’t care about they game they wouldn’t have bothered putting the effort in. Also this is not an exclusive proposition the people working on the DLC are probably also working on the second game, what a shocker people can multitask at work!
3. The fact that L4D2 is nearly identical to L4D1 will decimate the community for both games
- This one you may have a little bit of a point in, but that being said if the game is the same people won’t buy it and the original game will still thrive and if the new one is much better then the majority of the community will migrate over or (another shocker) play more than one game in a given time span. This is also a game in which a full server is 4 or 8 people, so they pool of players can shrink some without it being a huge problem.
4. The announced date is not nearly enough time to polish content or make significant gameplay changes
- Are you making the game? No? Then how the hell do you know? As a developer myself sometimes you don’t even know how long a project will take and the last person who would know is a fan on the internet. You can only tell this only by playing it (which you haven’t) and if it does turn out to be true then don’t buy the game because the quality isn’t there.
5. The new character designs seem bland and unappealing so far
- You saw a 5 minute cut scene which for most of the time was zombies walking around. Might I also remind you that the characters in the first game have maybe 100 lines of dialog (that’s being really generous) and the game isn’t trying to tell a narrative other than you need to get across the street and you need to shoot zombies to do it.
6. L4D2 is too bright to fit in with L4D1’s visual aesthetic
- Really? Were you trying to round out a top 10 list with this one? Because you only got to 9.
7. The fiddle-based horde music is extremely disliked, though the differently orchestrated music is otherwise welcome
- I thought the points couldn’t get more absurd than the last one but they have… I don’t know what to say, there is a volume slider for the music? The devil played the fiddle in that one Charlie Daniels song so it’s and evil instrument? I’m at a loss for how to respond because at this point I thought the post was actually a parody.
8. L4D2’s release will result in a drop in quality and frequency for L4D1 content, even compared to before
- This one is possible as I’m sure it would be a pain to keep making DLC for both games at once. I will say Valve has a reputation for supporting their games post release and not releasing anything that isn’t of high quality but only time will tell with this one. (Haters get only kinda valid point)
9. The community has lost faith in Valve’s former reputation for commitment to their games post-release
- Nothing like an untrue sweeping generalization to make you feel like a man at the end of your list. At the time of writing your group has 25,000 member (not a small amount) but my friend has a Steam groups that is 4 times that size for people who like to casually play mutiplayer games on Steam, so in the grand scheme you are vocal but a minority.
At the end of the day the haters may be right when the games comes out and it may be a cash grab, but Valve has for all the years it has been around only released high quality products and almost been unparalleled in free support for its games after launch so why would you believe this would be any different before seeing any of the facts, if all the free content they give away isn’t enough to get some goodwill from the fans I don’t know what is.
All I’m saying is that the world would be a better place in this (and a lot of other situations) if you sat down and waited for the facts before starting to bitch. Thank you, and goodnight.