GameSided Roundtable: Things The Industry Gets Away With
By Jon McSwain
Georgina Young (Twitter)
Do I have to pick just one? Really, there are so many free passes that games get these days it’s so hard to narrow it down. From the meat-head, roid-raging stereotyped lead protagonist, to the sheer laziness of writing that means things like the damsel in distress trope is still very much a thing, all the way through to not even bothering to hire talented voice actors, or in the case of Hyrule Warriors, ANY voice actors.
Oh wait, you mean something just one game does, and not ALL games. Well, I would have to stay relevant and go with the Borderlands series. Borderlands, don’t ever change …. oh wait, you haven’t. When I wrote my damning review of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, which if you are too lazy to read is just very, very bad for a plethora of reasons, many people took to Twitter to harass me about how biased I was against Borderlands, because it’s not bad, I’m just clearly pants at playing it. Oh well, that settles things then. Or, just maybe, I didn’t like that thing you like.
Borderlands is a game entirely made of padding. From the original Borderlands to the present incarnation, it has repeated the same mission of, kill dudes, collect thing, over and over until you are screaming “WHY WON’T THIS GAME JUST END” 11 hours in. Somehow, it still manages to maintain its die hard fan base. You can continue harassing me on Twitter now.
Martin Benn (Twitter)
I think one of the most overlooked aspects of games rests within the inability to save games whenever in horror games it RPGs. Automatic checkpoints are pretty standard in most games at this point, but occasionally a game will go “throwback” and make save spaces scarce.
I’m not one for nostalgia. I don’t care when superheroes change costumes in movies and I especially don’t care for games to limit themselves to what hardware was capable of 20 years ago. A lot of it makes playing a game stressful for the wrong reasons. I’m stressed not because I’m scared, but because my last checkpoint was two hours ago and I have to be at work in the morning. I do not want to re-play those two hours. I’m scared to start playing the game because any progress could be lost at a moment’s notice, regardless of how long I was playing and I only have a little bit of downtime.
There are alternatives that could be used. Instead of needing to stop and save, maybe limit inventory options. The trick of the game then becomes outfitting yourself at each checkpoint as oppose to needing to save. You still get your accessories and the save is in place, but it still manages to make you have to think very carefully of how to proceed. Games like The Last Of Us were able to still be suffocatingly suspenseful at times even with automatic saves. The updated Sonic games on PS3 allowed you to save what level you were on. It is time to let this byproduct of past hardware limitations go.