2007.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

free999enigma (67)in #gaming • 6 years ago

2007.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series - Blockbuster after blockbuster after blockbuster. 2007 was the year where you went big, or you went home, or maybe you went on XBLA. Everything had to be gigantic, everything had to be big budget, everything had to be the next greatest thing. And not everything could be.

Welcome to the year 2007, the year when people saw a 600$ phone and thought to themselves, “I need this thing that doesn’t even have a copy and past function for text”, to the bewilderment of Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft. The iPhone changed the world. Sure, it was far from being the first smartphone, but with its touch screen only control, its friendly interface, the promise of an app store to cater to all your needs and marketing so good it could sell water to a dead fish, it became a huge success. It sold over 1 million units within one year and signaled a new and interesting market opening in the mobile space. Though, to be fair, there were mobile games before it. A lot of them. Even the Sims had a mobile port before the iPhone was a thing. But it would spread and embolden others to step up. And so we’d have a new age of mobile gaming, with an interface perfectly suited to bring back to the forefront genres like adventure games, city builders, tycoons… and for the most part we’d get none of that.

What we would get int 2007 was the Amazon Kindle, a really neat e-book reader, the first 1TB Hard Drive was released by Hitachi, and a little company named Artificial Studios made Cellfactor Revolution, which was mostly a tech demo for a physics accelerator card called PhysX Ageia, which would be really interesting in a year. And then it wouldn’t.

This was the year of Go Big, or Go Home. And it started big, with World of Warcraft’s first expansion, Burning Crusade, selling 2.4 million units in a day. They sent only 1600 to Romania, even though there were over 10 thousand subscribers. Blizzard had the tendency to do that.
And because it was the year of Go Big or Go Home, even when things failed they would do so in a spectacular way. Two such failures came from Microsoft. One of them was a hardware failure in the Xbox 360. A recall was issued, costing the company near 1 billion dollars. The other disaster was Windows Vista. Not necessarily the new operating system itself, parts of it were good, a lot of parts weren’t, but what was completely horrible was the marketing, especially on the gaming aspect, with the new DirectX 10 being heralded as the second coming of 3D, but artificially limited to Windows Vista. Games using DirectX 10 would be made to run by community on Windows XP with little effort. The company also ported its Xbox Live’s console infrastructure to Windows, calling it Games for Windows Live, without even including mouse support for the interface, and expecting people to pay money for access to achievements and multiplayer. Simply put, the people in charge of the gaming division were clueless about PC gaming, and were doing more damage to the platform than Sony ever did with the dominance of the Playstation 2. The damage has yet to be repaired.

But Microsoft also had one huge success that year, a gigantic one. It released Halo 3. Something described as the biggest video game launch ever. The game made over 170 million dollars in a single day. Thanks to great marketing and a captive audience, it quickly became massive sensation. It was penetrating the mainstream so much that churches were starting to use its theme song, in hopes of driving up attendance, and it was being used as a bit of a recruitment tool by the army, with the blessing of Microsoft. The kind of success that Halo 3 had, became what everyone wanted to chase down.

And they did, with Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare setting a new sales record that surpassed Halo 3, and also managed to forever cement the death of the World War 2 setting for first person shooters for the next decade.

Since I mentioned the mainstream, another game hit it that year, but not in a good way. Bioware, now a property of Electronic Arts, did its best to create an epic Sci-Fi RPG, based on their own universe. And they came out with a great game, Mass Effect, one that included about 5 seconds of apparent nudity. When the mainstream media got wind of this, it became the next scandal to be outraged about. The game was being accused of corrupting children… the same children that shouldn’t be able to play the mature rated game, and can easily lewder acts on billboards.

You could call that a failure of the media. But it was more than that. It was a taste of things to come. TV stations knew their days were numbered. A box attached to a TV set let the viewer access a world of limitless imagination. So the only way the media was going to keep relevant was to rile up the old curmudgeons in hopes of increasing its relevance slightly, until its audience finally died out and left the world a better place.

But speaking of failures. Like I said, it was Go Big or Go Home even when it came to disasters. NCSoft released the second version of Tabula Rasa, Richard Garriott’s new MMO. It was made in half the time it needed, it had a quarter of the promotion it could use, and within two years it would be shut down. At that point in time, MMO players seemed to love the PvP aspect quite a lot. And a looter-shooter like Tabula Rasa couldn’t really work then. Same was true for Hellgate London, made by some of the creators of Diablo. Both games that, honestly, with a bit more polished and released four years later would have had much better odds of survival.

And then there was Lair. A Playstation 3 game made to highlight the incredible power of the Six Axis motion controller. When that very feature made it a total failure, and Sony reacted by telling people they were playing it wrong, it killed the Six Axis as something that developers were actively trying to use.

2007 was, however, not a year popular because of failure. All these things I’ve mentioned are barely a footnote, compared to the many franchises that were started this year and great games that came out. This was when Skate and Rock Band first showed up, as alternatives to the Activision series of games that were quickly being driven into the ground. Uncharted came to the Playstation 3 in time to compete with a remake of the original Tomb Raider, and focusing a lot more on combat helped it succeed in this new market. Tomb Raider Anniversary however did set a precedent of games being constantly remade over the next few years.

Ubisoft Montreal brought us Assassin’s Creed that year. A game with a lot of hard work put into it, recreating a segment of the holy land a thousand years ago, with a wonderful parkour system a twisty tale of time traveling through memories, and ancient conspiracies, and about four times the size it needed to be to actually qualify as entertaining.

But if you really want to talk great games of 2007, the look no further than Two Worlds. Now, this may sound like a joke, but I mean it. Two Worlds had a lot of effort, misguided effort, into creating an alternative to Oblivion. It failed, but it did so in amazing ways. .
And, of course, we had the fantastic Witcher. The first game of a little company from Poland called CD Projekt, that spent the early ‘90’s pirating. Built with some help from Bioware, The Witcher gave an international audience a taste of Polish fantasy literature and lit the fire for a fantastic series upon which they would build an empire.

Fans of the immersive sim genre would get a spiritual successor to System Shock, with Bioshock. Made by the same people that created Shodan’s second outing, with more of an emphasis on a high quality directed experience, and with fewer progression elements. Bioshock was an exceptional game with fantastic storytelling and a marvelous world to explore. But those that wanted a more open style of game would have something else to sink their teeth into. A game almost a decade in the making. A fantastic open world experience, an immersive Sim with a simulated world. STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl. Through a lot of hard work, the people at GSC Game World created one of the most awe inspiring first person shooters ever made. Great graphics, great gameplay, a world that you could lose yourself in, with characters and creatures that didn’t exist for your sake, but actually seemed to live there, much like the beloved Gothic series.

Those that didn’t mind their shooter being a bit more traditional, and their graphics so good that it would still be the gold standard a decade later, would have Crysis. Crytek’s new attempt at getting over Far Cry and surpassing it. In terms of visual fidelity and the attempt to recreate a living world it was astonishing. It wasn’t half bad in terms of gameplay either. And even though it required a beefy computer to run well at the highest possible settings, it was a big enough success on PC. Though, maybe not big enough for the head of the company.
The fact that Crysis was gougers was undeniable. But it did get released during the greatest marketing match in the video games industry since the Sega Genesis and Nintendo Entertainment System days. Marketing budgets were high, and money was being spent everywhere. And while Nintendo had its own thing, with Super Mario Galaxy being the new hotness, the other platforms were still mostly basing their success on spectacle. So, certain gaming media outlets did their best to downplay how good the game looked. A good example of this is the now defunct GameTrailers.

That really didn’t do much to dissuade people from sticking with the PC for titles like the ones released by Valve. The company released a it’s last attempt at creating an episodic game, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, alongside the previous episodes, the base games, and two more surprise titles. The much delayed Team Fortress 2 was one of them. A shooter where every character had their own play style and abilities, coupled with a fantastic art direction and a way of telling stories in a multiplayer only game, devoid of an actual plot, that went above and beyond what any other game of this type had ever done. The other game was Portal. A puzzle game built on top of the work of a bunch of students, that tried to make you think with portals. Technologically it was fantastic, in terms of gameplay it was amazing, and its writing style and characters set new standards.

With so many fantastic games, which one could be the game of 2007? In terms of influence over the future, Team Fortress 2 is the one that really went the distance, inspiring a lot of games even a decade later. It could be Half-Life 2 Episode 2, the game that has left people obsessing after its ending years and years. It could be Teeworlds, well, maybe not Teeworlds, or Supreme Commander, even though it was a really great take on bringing back Total Anihilation’s style of RTS. No. The game of the year was Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare. It’s not because it was the best shooter of the moment, but it’s because it set a standard for what an easily reproduceable blockbuster is. A modern military shooter with a short and heavily directed singleplayer campaign, featuring one shocking moment, and with a multiplayer mode akin to Counter-Strike, but with a heavy emphasis on progression. This recipe would be reused year after year over the next decade, in spite of how tired it may have become. For better or for worse, mostly for worse, we would live in its shadow for many years.

So we end 2007. Next time we move to more depressing events. Goodbye.