Developers Aren't Owed Niceties

 

Right before sitting down at my computer to write this post I read an article online about how the lead developer for Starfield went on a bit of a rant because people who don't know anything about game dev criticize games that they play.  More specifically he said that he didn't like that people will speculate on why things were made a certain way within a game when they have no knowledge of the process and yet talk about it like an authority.  Which is fine, it's no a statement I agree with 100% but I get where he's coming from.  But there was a line in that article where the guy said that he doesn't talk ill of other games out of "respect for his fellow developers" and this, to me, seems incredibly daft.

He's not the only one who has said this kind of thing either, there's been a sort of prevailing attitude in a lot of gaming spaces where it has become taboo to overly criticize developers just because the process of making games is hard.  I first ran across this idea when watching Awesome Games Done Quick where occassionally a speedrunner would accuse a developer of being "lazy" and that's why certain tricks within certain games work but then these comments became frowned upon and you aren't really allowed to say that kind of thing anymore.

Obviously game development is an extremely difficult undertaking.  With it being an amalgamation of a number of art forms as well as technical ability it's fairly obvious that the process of creating a game, either by yourself or in a team, is a stressful thing to do.  But the other thing that you have to consider here is that games also cost money.  Once money is put into the equation, any requirement for me or anyone else to be nice to you over the thing you made goes out the window.  I worked for my money and then I chose, based on the developer telling me their game is good and cool and interesting, to give you money in exchange for the thing that you made.  If then, the thing that you made sucks shit then I get to call you a stupid lying, talentless asshole.  

Take my famously well documented distaste for the Outlast games.  I get that making a horror game is hard, you have to code it all together to make sure it's actually playable and then have a bunch of artists, musicians and writers create things that are scary and then all of that has to come together and be marketed and shipped.  That's hard, I get it.  But Outlast also cost me about 20 quid and wasn't very fucking good.  The writing was shit, the music is forgetable, the game isn't scary and the enemies are are not very well coded and behave like shit.  I would go as far to say that the developers are Red Barrels are inept, having completely no idea on what makes a good horror game and instead just slapping together a bunch of imagry that's generally accepted to be "spooky" and calling it a day.  It's lazy, badly made dross and I do not feel even a single pang of guilt for saying that.  You know what else those guys are? fucking liars too.  The original marketing for Outlast made it look like Mirrors Edge Survival Horror Edition and I thought that idea was cool as fuck but then it came out and it's a slow, plodding hiding and sometimes jogging away kind of horror game and it's embarassing that  I was charged money for it.  

If Outlast was made by 2 guys and distributed for free then I wouldn't be so harsh.  I would still give my criticisms of what I didn't like about it but I would assume inexperience over ineptitude or malice. But these were guys who were previously at Ubisoft now telling me to roll up for a brand new horror experience and what I got was a waste of cash.  Outlast IS lazy and poorly made and it costs money so the devs at that company who effectively stole my cash can get fucked. 

Also why not drop the ego?  There's a lot of developers I've interacted with, such as the developers for Crosscode and Benbo Quest who get defensive and insulted when you, even gently, tell them things about their games that kind of sucks.  Criticism is good for artists and creators, it's how you get better.  Back in like, 2014, I wrote a book that I published to Amazon called Noise and I shopped it around a few people I knew for some feedback.  The thing that pissed me off about this whole process is that out of the 10 or so people I gave free copies of the book to for that feedback, only ONE gave me any kind of genuine criticisms of the story.  It fucks me off to no end that everyone just told me it was great when, reading it back now, even I can see glaring flaws with it.  I'm never going to improve as a writer if people don't give me shit when my work is low quality .

I am currently studying and working on a game of my own.  I plan to release it to wherever will take it for a low price, but I'm hoping to maybe get some money for it when it's done.  If you buy it and think that it's a poorly made piece of garbage, I'm fully expecting you to call me out on that.  If you didn't like it and have some constructive things to say, that's even more useful and if you liked it and want to say something nice, that will stroke my ego good and proper, thank you in advance.  But I am not owed niceities and gentle language just because the thing I have decided to try and teach myself is hard.  If you're so fragile that you think that difficult tasks require kid gloves, even when you're taking peoples money as you do that task, then stop.  

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.  If you can't handle armchair developers calling you a lazy asshole for charging them 20 bucks for your shitty Zelda clone, then stop being a developer.  Just fuck off, the art world is worse with you in it.

CrossCode

 

I'm pretty critical of a lot of games that I play and when there's something I don't like, I can tend to be a little mean about it.  But usually when I play a game like that, I can at least see the appeal of why other people like it, so while I'll be mean towards the game I won't think anything less of the people who do like it.  Breath of the Wild is a good example of this because I think that game is a steaming pile of overly-easy, uninteresting garbage but I can totally get why someone else might really enjoy it.  But every so often I play a game that's so foul, so heinous, so irredeemably shit in almost every way, that if you admit to enjoying it in front of me I will judge you negatively for as long as I know you.  Famously Outlast 2 was one of those games but now CrossCode can be added alongside it in the hall of shame.

Released in 2018, CrossCode follows the adventures of Lea who wakes up on a cargo ship inside of a fictional MMORPG called Crossworlds and is told that she must follow the main quest line of the game in order to regain her memory.  From there she meets other players, gets involved with weird villains and uncovers a bunch of schemes and conspiricies which she must get to the bottom of.  I dont want to spoil the story too much JUST INCASE there's some massive twat reading this post who has decided that the extremely generic sounding plot sounds interesting but that's the basics.  Presentation wise that game has some decently pretty pixel art but the whole thing is done in this faux-anime style and the story writing and dialogue has this weird aura of smugness about it like the devs are constantly jacking off somewhere quietly behind you as you play because they are so fucking pleased with just how "clever" they are.  

But whatever, smug and shitty writing aside, the game play is arguably the more important factor here.  Well when you first start CrossCode you may be tricked, like I was, that the game plays pretty well.  The world seems fairly expansive, there seems to be a lot of quests to do and the combat feels pretty tight at first.  However the more you play the more it all falls apart.  The combat being the biggest offender here which starts out OK and then becomes repetetive and obnoxious with almost every encounter being an absolute chore.  You can throw little balls at enemies by clicking and then if you pull the mouse near to Lea you can change to a melee attack.  You get a sort of Pound Land Sphere Grid that you use to upgrade various things like shot power and aiming speed so you can sort of build Lea to fit your play style.  Also on that grid are various skills which seems cool and look very flashy when you do them but most of which are an absolute ballache to pull off in the heat of the combat.  Not hard, mind you, the actual execution of the moves is very simple but awkard to do when under fire and ultimately not that useful with the exception of the spin attack you can perform by just holding down the space bar.  After a while the game will start to demand that you hit enemies with various elemental attacks or in specific parts of their body which doesn't really add any challenge but sure as fuck adds heaps of annoyance.  

The quests are another problem because there are plenty of side activities for you to do but almost all of them are uninteresting and the rewards you get for doing them are PATHETIC.  I spent the first few streams of the game trying to dilligently do all the quests I could find as I got them but they were so boring, so samey and the rewards so bloody useless that I stopped and just powered through the game as fast as I could.  Although the world design didn't make that easy because while the world seems large, its not very interesting.  Every area has a unique theme but every part of that area looks the same so once you've spent 10 minutes running around its very easy to just get bored and glaze over.  The world is also very cluttered and hard to navigate with the game demanding that you run across platforms and up and down different elevations but there are numerous points when that becomes a real pain the ass because the perspective is dogshit and the graphics are muddy as fuck.  These smug pricks KNEW this was a problem as well because they showed some footage from a new, very similar looking game they are working on via twitter where the environments have shifted to proper 3D graphics to make that shit clearer.  

The game is also mind boggingly long for absolutely no good reason.  When its not wasting your time with shit exploration and shit side quests, its having you navigate maybe the most annoying Zelda-esque dungeons I've ever played through in my life.  All of them essentially the same fucking thing just with a different coat of paint depending on what the flavor of element you're getting is and filled to the brim with the most long winded, tedious and sometimes painfully obtuse puzzles you've ever seen.  Each dungeon is extremely formulaic with them being structured like puzzle→combat→puzzle ad nauseum until you get the dungeons specific element power, then repeat again until the boss.  The puzzles are are quite samey to, usually involving pushing blocks, bouncing balls into targets or clearing a path for a slow moving ball to hit a thing to open a door.  The bosses at the end of each dungeon are also extremely uninspired so if you've played basically any Zelda game since A Link To the Past you've seen basically everything that Crosscode has to offer.

There is SO MUCH more detail I could go into about why I hate this game but if I did that this blog post might be the size of a Russian Novel (that means over 200k words, by the way) so to sum it up for you Crosscode has shit writing, shit world design, shit gameplay, shit dungeons, shit progression and some quite pretty yet very busy and annoying pixel art.  Somehow this game is quite well liked within the indie scene and I just don't get it.  One day I'll replay CrossCode and actually write that Russian Novels worth of a critique for a YouTube video but for now consider this the TLDR version of why I think it sucks

Fuck this game