I have a couple ideas for blog posts on a backlog. I’ve been planning on posting them for the last couple days, but I want to give them a better time commitment than I plan to for this one. So I came up with a short rant about the current console gaming landscape so this blog doesn’t whither and die like all my others have, haha.
It’s no secret that console gaming is pretty much dominated by First (and some Third) Person Shooters at the moment, specifically Call of Duty. At present, many people have been complaining that the market is flooded with shooters with no innovation, and the two biggest targets of this diatribe are Call of Duty and Battlefield.
This is where my little rant comes in. I can definitely understand the bitching in regards to Call of Duty: the series has had at least one new release every year for the past 9 years. Of these, the last 6 have been running on the same engine with little in the way of differentiation between games. Admittedly I was quite a fan of the series up until around Black Ops when it started to get boring. The story mode was fun, as was 4-player split-screen, but the online multiplayer was never really my thing – give me Metal Gear Online any day of the week (speaking of which, can’t wait to play MGO3 when Ground Zeroes comes out). Furthermore, I had always played COD for the story modes – I remember having my socks blown off by the Russian campaign in COD: Finest Hour, and COD4 was absolutely brilliant. However, by the time that MW3 rolled around, the story was… predictable. Every single bloody level ends with a massive moment, whether it be something getting blown up or a main character dies for no other reason than because they needed to fill their body-count quota.
However, I do not understand why Battlefield gets tacked on with Call of Duty when people deride the current gaming landscape. Is it because it is setting itself up to dethrone Call of Duty? Is it because they’re both shooters? Is it because they’re popular? Is it because it’s not art either? Hell, I wouldn’t mind if they were bashing the modern Medal of Honor games since they pretty much are Call of Duty (cue enraged fanboys). Battlefield has only had 3 main releases in 10 years (not counting spin-offs). You might be able to make this argument when Battlefield 4 comes out because it looks like EA is giving BF a semi-annual rotation to coincide with MOH, but that’s not the current state of gaming, that’s the future.
Admittedly, I am currently a Battlefield fanboy. Bad Company 2 was like a revelation after so many stale hours spent playing COD online, and quickly became my multiplayer title of choice. BF3 has been in and out of my PS3 regularly for well over a year now. While I could give less than half a shit about the single-player, the multiplayer is where it’s at. It’s a far more team-based and wide-open game than COD, and suits my style more as a result. So when people compare the two games… is it because they both have guns? Because if you have more of an interest in shooters than simply dismissing them, you’d see that they play quite differently.
That said, I’d like to see the gaming landscape open up a bit, but considering how expensive it is becoming to make a AAA game these days (especially since the next-gen is a year or 2 away), I can’t see that happening soon. But then again, people are always bitching about how the end of ______ is near, and it’s no different with the shooter market. People need to nut up or shut up…
Wow. This ended up being longer than planned… eh oh well. Don’t turn the comments section into a flame war.
