Apparently the real innovation in the games industry is applied to keeping one’s head above water...
Some of our favourite developers just can’t seem to catch a break these days. How can a company survive, when merely being good just isn’t good enough?
What is an arena? It is a confined space in which contestants battle to the death. What is fate? It is an inevitable outcome that one can not escape. Everyone’s ultimate fate is death, but it’s the moments and years leading up to our oblivion, and our perceived helplessness over their contents, that one usually associates with the F-word.
Arena of Fate is a Multi-player Online Battle Arena video game, one that the taste-makers at Crytek feel is an accurate depiction of their target demographic: bad cosplayers.
Perchance while snarfing wurst and sauerkraut at Gamescom 2013, the Yerli brothers blew the bier foam from their upper lips long enough to see an army of amateur seamstresses and knitlords, all parading shamelessly as ersatz doppelgangers of their favourite folk heroes and Fräuleins of fiction.
“Wunderbar!” exclaimed Cevat Yerli. “Zis is zee ticket! Our LoL-killer stands before us!”
Avni Yerli snapped the suspenders of his lederhosen in contemplation. “It iz decided, mein brother. Unt not a moment too soon! Eff vee do not rush to zee ALDI, we might miss out on zee discounted Cuckoo Clocks!”
If initial reactions are anything to go by, Arena of Fate is failing to excite MOBA fans. Perhaps a robust and nuanced game lurks beneath the surface, but puncturing that thick meniscus requires one to focus on coarsely rendered avatars of some of the most generic heroes in the public domain.
Character design and personality are a huge part of any MOBA’s appeal, and Crytek already had a cache of ready-made memorable characters from the TimeSplitters series ready to go. For expendable respawning mobs, they could’ve used those drugged-up super-soldiers from Haze.
Perhaps Arena of Fate is designed to fail. Maybe it’s the fulcrum of some Uwe Bollesque rebate scheme that only makes sense if you understand German tax law. Whatever the truth may be, this whole initiative has left more than a few gamers scratching their heads, wondering just how long Crytek can survive.
Speaking of questionable choices, Brain Fargo made some candid revelations in the press release that finally revealed the launch date for Wasteland 2 – almost a full year after the initial estimate floated in the Kickstarter campaign. Drawing on pre-orders, sales of inXile back-catalogue titles, and Fargo’s own personal fortune, he doubled the games initial budget to over five million dollars.
One cannot help but applaud his dedication to the project, but we do question his semantics. Usually the word ‘budget’ is used to describe expenditure that is under control.
I’m quite looking forward to playing Wasteland 2; I backed the Kickstarter. Yet if its costs drive inXile to the wall, it will drop a neutron bomb on our newly-discovered faith in crowd-funding, and it’s power to keep fondlyremembered franchises alive.
It just doesn’t seem fair, does it? Having a quality middleware graphics engine, or artistic integrity... none of it is good enough to guarantee anything resembling corporate immortality. For the game makers there is no Final Victory.
Or is there? One of the more eccentric independent developers recently discovered one weird trick to keep himself on our news feeds for all eternity. In light of his name’s ability to ‘trigger’ sensitive readers, we will speak only of his deeds, and attempt to keep his identity anonymous.
This clever fellow made a successful game, earned a small fortune, and now speaks of selling his company and its associated IP. Financially, he’s set for life. But riches are not enough for this man – he also covets attention. So how do you maintain your fame when you no longer produce anything? Simple: you become famous for being famous. You become a controversy machine. Our nameless dev’s wining formula: he assumes the moral high ground on a hot-button topic, he goes on Twitter and says very rude things to those who disagree with him, and then he deletes all his Tweets to destroy the evidence. And, as he pointed out in those very Tweets, criticising this tactic only makes it more effective, as it only brings him more attention. When vapourware is the air you breathe, and bile is the blood in your veins, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
His thoughts and his infamy replicate endlessly, like a virus. It’s the perfect crime!
We applaud his daring. Who Dares Wins, after all, and this chap is most definitely winning at life. Well, except for one small matter of semantics: if you boast of being a virus, then you’re admitting that you’re the lowest form of life on Earth. JAMES COTTEE