The new Spider Man game dropped recently and while I've not played it yet it does at least look pretty good. I'm not one for comic book heroes personally but it does look like a generally pretty fun action game. Something I'll absolutely grab once the price drops a bit. However I'm not here to talk about the game itself, but about some recent controversy that surrounds it regarding puddles.
The story goes that there's a room in the game that was shown during a trailer at E3 looking a certain way but when the game came out the room looked a bit different. Now I'm not going to say flat out that the release version looks like shit but it does look worse. It's hard to make a game look like shit in 2018 but there clearly is more polish on the trailer version than there is in the version players paid money for.
So this prompts a bunch of people on twitter to start asking questions to the developer, Insomniac, about what the hell happened. Insomniac responded by shrugging their shoulders saying "we didn't do anything" which upset a number of people and then glorious internet drama happened. Of course, when there's drama news websites flock to it to write about it (kind of like I'm doing lol) and put in their two cents. To my surprise and horror (not really) there's a great deal of outlets calling the issue stupid and using the whole thing to take a jab at anyone who has THE NERVE to criticize the game. For example one idiot on Forbes writes his article like gamers are nothing but a pack of hungry wolves just waiting to rip any game dev apart if they do meet their high standards.
It seems like that idiot along with every other idiot who wrote articles like that are missing the point entirely as to why people are upset. Let's make one thing very clear straight away, the puddle isn't the reason why people are upset, it's the fact that we were lied to by promotional material, AGAIN. If all the trailers for Spider Man were cutscenes no one would say shit but that was GAMEPLAY so I don't think it's so unreasonable to ask that the gameplay looks the same as your damn trailer. It's also not the first time it's happened either, just off the top of my head Dark Souls 2 and Silent Hill Downpour are guilty of the same thing and it was JUST as bullshit with those games as it is with this one. Imagine that you went to a restaurant and there was a picture of a juicy, medium rare, perfectly seasoned absolutely delicious looking steak on a menu, so you order it. When it arrives at your table though it's well done and just not quite as appealing as it was in the picture. So you eat it anyway because you love steak and yeah, it's still good, but it's not what you paid money for. Do you see where I'm coming from here?
The worst part about this whole thing is that if you look up the game on metacritic, despite the controversy it still has an 87 rating. People are still enjoying the game despite their gripe with the graphics so all these outlets are shitting on gamers for what? Being upset about promotional material lying to us about what the game looks like? It's understandable that things change over the course of development but don't wave the game in our faces going "LOOK AT HOW GREAT THIS LOOKS" and then make it not look like that. For some, they are paying money BECAUSE they said it looked that good.
Sure, it doesn't ruin the game and sure, it's not really THAT much of a big deal. For me though, seeing the response of the gaming press further cements the idea that gaming media is nothing but a massive collection of gaming shitrags not worth giving the time of day to.
No comments:
Post a Comment