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Comic for Monday 9/12 (Early High Res)
🕑 Added 2022-09-11 18:43:46 +0000 UTCI am so over these big "press events" with nothing real to show. If you want to get me hyped, show me why I should be hyped. If your game is so early in the pipeline that it doesn't even have a name yet, perhaps its too early for the whole dog and pony show.
This weekend's big "Ubisoft Forward Showcase" made such a big deal about what's happening with Assassin's Creed, and all they had were snippets of pre-rendered cutscenes, and in most cases, logos. For games with tenuous "someday" release dates. Even Mirage's general "2023" window doesn't mean anything with the regularity games are getting delayed these days.
Look, Assassin's Creed has an uphill battle with me regardless. Once a series I much looked forward to, I've become very lukewarm on the franchise over the past handful of iterations. I never even touched Valhalla. It's not that I'm not open to being excited about the AC franchise again; I'd love to feel like I want to play another one. But a bunch of empty words about a "hub experience" tying the games together in "meaningful ways" isn't going to do it. It's all just noise.
Letting me know they're finally taking the series to feudal Japan? That would have done wonders back before Ghosts of Tsushima blew them out of the water a couple years ago. Now it's going to take more than a 2-second teaser to convince me I should care about any of it.
Some of this ties into my wish that games would sit on their reveals longer, only pulling back the curtain closer to the release date. We now get game announcements so early, that even if you initially get excited, it's then 4-5 years before the game comes out, and nobody wants to maintain anticipation for that long. So instead by the time it comes out you've already sort of feeling like its old news.
I love a good logo. I love a good CGI cutscene. But gameplay or gtfo.
Comments
Kaedys
I honestly don't understand why game companies reveal so early anyway. As you say, it's difficult at best to maintain any level of anticipation for that long, so many more customers now are just "meh, w/e, that's so 2014" when a new game actually *releases*. I can only infer that it's a stockholder thing, to show potential and current stockholders that they are doing things that'll sell well in the future, but it comes, I suspect, at the cost of ACTUALLY selling as well as it could if it were revealed closer to release. Games that reveal that early also heavily risk falling into the "vaporware" label pit, especially if they have to delay for any reason (as *many* games do). Even if they do release, and even if that release is well-received, for many it becomes less of a "neat, that game I was wanting released!" and more of a "oh, hey look, that game ACTUALLY crawled across the finish line after all". I think gamers as a whole are also just heavily jaded from the last decade or two of really hyped reveals and really crap games. NMS was perhaps the most notorious, but Anthem is also really big up there on my list. Such an amazing reveal, such incredible things they said they were doing, and such a "meh" (at best) actual gameplay experience once it released. I'm firmly at the point where even "gameplay footage" doesn't do it for me, since much of that is half fabricated, using a version of the game engine that they literally can't ship because it can't run on less than a NASA supercomputer, and containing a slew of features that won't make it to the release, and might have already been cut at the time the footage is first aired. I'm not impressed until I see the post-release gameplay and reviews, ideally by people that do not professionally review games (since it's pretty obvious that that's a VERY "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" type of industry between the reviewers and the game companies).
Stephen Shook
I never got the appeal of Assasin Creed. It's one of those game series that I'm like I should sit and play but, never do.
