I’m Pleased to Say - TotalBiscuit is Not Happy With My Favorite Game

First and foremost, Planetside is my all time favorite game. This post (disclaimer) involves Planetside in some intimate detail that you may or may not be interested in. 

TotalBiscuit is someone I like to promote on frequent occasion. He is brutally subjective in his comments that closely reflect a seasoned gamer’s point of view on games. Much of what he says is blunt, and often articulated in a way that gamers with higher than average standards wish they could convey. It is this reason that I rarely find myself in disagreement with TB’s commentary, and this video is certainly one which I can stand by in bitter/sweet agreement, here’s why.

Rarely, and I mean rarely do I ever feel that sense of over-anticipation for a game anymore as I push 30 years old. I’ve seen it all, from 8 bit up. The failures, the surprises, the IP big-bangs of which launched hundred-million dollar franchises and marketproof consoles. In this time, I’ve earned a sixth sense, a sense which enables me to judge a game fairly based on its development and ambitions before being released. You know, the ability to decipher a well marketed piece of garbage from a lesser known gem that has the potential to change everything. This sense, more simply, is a summary of what has worked in the past, and what has failed. Based on this summary, anyone can theoretically anticipate a game’s overall success or failure. TB is also a Planetside fan, who I believe has this sixth sense. He has highlighted the red flags that have put the Planetside franchise in Jeopardy  and it leaves me wondering if the SOE crew, working on the game, have any idea how flammable these flags are. 

One such flag is the release date. It is awkward, as TB mentions. This is a F2P game from the get-go. SOE is horribly famous for being out of touch on these matters, probably because many of these executives are better suited for marketing DVD players than the more volatile gaming industry. In the game’s curent state, this alone may kill Planetside 2 off before it has a chance to suceed.

One other flag worth mentioning; the game has consistently patched out of the Planetside fan zone, and into the newly adopted ‘I-just-downloaded-the-beta’ crowd. The difference here is how both groups have experienced large scale FPS’s in the last decade. If you were to ask the typical gamer today what he or she would consider a reasonably well manufactured large scale FPS, they would undoubtedly mention the Battlefield franchise at some point. Few know of Planetside, or understand the concept that made it fun. 

Teamwork, that is what defines Planetside. There is no content worth exploring alone, really, in the original game. You are matched with armies, not singular foes. It is this reason alone that made Planetside a unique experience. If you weren’t in a squad, platoon, or outfit, you were “not playing the game correctly”. This was a general understanding, and it worked well. To this day, no game has come close to recreating that type of communal warfare among strangers on the internet. So it doesn’t surprise me that the many who have not experienced such a grand scale war game can’t help but relate better toward a Battlefield experience; one which rewards the player for both group and solo run-and-gun. This is something the SOE executives have picked up on, and set out to accommodate, all to the demise of what Planetside is at its core.

The world deserves a true successor to Planetside. However, It pains me to say that my sixth sense is convincing me, that if the game launches November 20th, all the world will get is another mediocre F2P FPS.

journeyofagamer:

In light of recent events today and yesterday which I covered a little bit in this post.

Doing some investigating of my own turns up that Lauren Wainwright has pretty much reviewed every big Square Enix game in the past couple of years and favourably at that. For someone who said on her twitter page and I quote

“Just to clarify on SquareEnix: I’ve done consultancy work for them in the past. A lot of journalists do. I’ve never reviewed the products.”

Oh yeah? Those don’t look like consultancy work to me. Your bullshit and your cowardly tactics has caused someone with integrity to step down from doing something they loved, something that was each week pushing the boundaries of games journalism, was something fresh and something, intelligently and hilariously written. The several articles I’ve seen point to the contrary. It’s also a shame that she is trying to cover up the fact that she has worked for Square Enix on her Journalisted profile, which as you can now see has been removed contrary to the picture. Fuck people who take work for companies like Square Enix or any other advertisting company that make threats like that , on the basis that they will review the games favourably. We only have to look at the Jeff Gerstmann debacle a few years ago to see how fucking corrupt this industry is. That was the first time my eyes were really opened to this kind of thing. There are innumerable instances of corruption out there wether it be in publishing or the reviewers themselves, you just have to look.

This was never about gender, it was about corruption in the games journalism world. It’s sickening to see people attacking her because she is a female, that is wrong and I in no way condone it. Whether male or female corruption transcends gender. Robert Florence mentioned a guy called Dave Cook who originally entered the win a PS3 competition and won. He is giving it to charity but that is besides the point, he shouldn’t have entered into the competition in the first place. That goes into a whole other issue about the VGA’s which frankly I don’t have time for. It’s an embarrassing sham and so is the website Gametrailers.

I implore you, find these corrupt people and call them out on it. We’re never going to grow as gamers, as an industry if this continues to happen. Educate, don’t shy away from the serious issues. It’s pathetic that these people get away with this shit while good honest people have to suffer, like Robert Florence or way back when Jeff Gerstmann got fired because of conflicts with PR and companies that didn’t like he reviews because they were honest and not what THEY wanted to see. People with true talent suffer and the hacks somehow win.

Fuck everyone who had anything to do with that PS3 giveaway shite, fuck anyone who gives favourable reviews because they are friends with a person at a company, fuck anybody who takes bribes no matter how meagre or innocent looking, fuck the pr-journalist friendship with benefits bullshit, fuck anyone who sits there selling junk products to target audiences in the name of video games. Have some fucking backbone and rise above the dregs.

EDIT: This is her friend who lets her go along to the press events etc.

I plan to post my own take on the ethics of game journalism. Until then, I’m avidly listening to the opinions of fellow gaming-intellectuals. I highly encourage everyone to participate in capturing the integrity of your favorite review tanks for yourself; weigh their perspectives by what makes genuine sense and what instinctively feels diluted by greed and corporate appeal. Chances are good that if what they’re saying feels wrong, it is, and the behavior can be traced to earlier postings (more evident with freelance journalists in the industry). Also, +1 to this author for the Jeff Gerstmann reference.