2010.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

2010.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series - Welcome, one and all, welcome to the year 2010. Welcome to the post-PC era. Welcome to the year when everyone was trying to push underdeveloped and underpowered hardware as the future, when it couldn’t even handle the present.

We now enter a new age… we seem to do that very often on this show. And this age is probably the most short lived of them all. Welcome one and all to the post PC age. The age when everyone and their cow would peddle underdeveloped and underpowered hardware as being the future, when it couldn’t even handle the present.

It began with Apple announcing the iPad, a tablet device that finally brought the concept to the attention of the masses. It quickly became the new thing, and it would stay the new thing for a while. The intense marketing made a lot of people, and a lot of schools, buy them, only to abandon them when they realized a cheaper laptop was still better for productivity. And the age continued with the Kinect, the final version of Microsoft’s Project Natal. It was supposed to replace traditional controls, beyond gamepads, beyond motion controls, it was now gesture control. Only it didn’t really work that well. But well enough to usher in a new trend, that of the dance games.

The world at large was still reeling from the economy going belly up, countries were burning, and not in a figurative way, and Detroid was starting to look like Robocop predicted it would. That year Haiti was hit by a massive earthquake that killed over 100 thousand people, and left over one million homeless. And just a month later, an even bigger earthquake hit Chile that killed considerably fewer people. In more geologically stable places of the world, people were finishing up the tallest building ever erected by mankind. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai. And speaking of biggest things ever, the biggest spill in the oil industry occurred after the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion. A spill that blanketed the Gulf of Mexico in oil, causing severe damage to the environment. Things were getting so bad, that even the Nuclear option was on the table, though I guess that’s more because someone really wanted to see a nuke blow up.

But what people interested in video games were more excited about than blowing up the ocean was a sequel to the game that had cornered the RTS genre. Starcraft 2 had been announced years prior, with the tagline Hell, it’s about time, and 12 years after the original, it really was. Wings of Liberty brought an exciting singleplayer campaign, designed by some of the people that brought you Red Alert 2, actually, combined with a multiplayer mode that struggled a bit to replace its predecessor, but eventually did. It was also only one third of a game. It take quite a few years for the whole thing to get done. The RTS genre was going through a few growing pains, or death spasms, depending on your perspective. While we were still getting some innovative titles in the genre, like RUSE, a multiplayer strategy game focused on deception, there was also the likes of Command and Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight, which was trying to insert MOBA elements into the game, with disastrous consequences. Through it’s not like Electronic Arts wasn’t trying to bastardize everything it had on had back then, what with it turning the Ultima series into a browser based casual title very little gameplay and actual connection to the Ultima series. And since it was working, the game was marketed with a buxom maiden asking you to play the game. A method of marketing that would reach its peak with Evony, a similar game released in 2009 that had now started advertising itself like some sort of secretive kinky game for perverts.

But when it came to marketing games in strange ways, Electronic Arts still held the cup. Sure, Capcom may misplace fake zombie parts around town, but EA paid people to protest its new game, Dante’s Inferno, just to drum up fake outrage. It also held sinning contests that promised a nights of debauchery, and sent money to reviewers because it was the edgy thing to do. Its attempt to create something viral peaked that year, the industry in general tried to take it down a notch, after a botched marketing stunt for Splinter Cell Conviction almost got an actor shot by the police New Zealand. Sure, there would still be the odds bomb scare because of a dumb marketing campaign, but 2010 can be considered as peak stupid.

Big budget games were still the norm in 2010. Electronic Arts was trying to bring back Medal of Honor in the wake of the success of Call of Duty, and managed to create a horrible game that would only be outmatched by its sequel. Red Dead Redemption was bringing the GTA formula tot he Wild West and selling like mad. Mass Effect 2 was turning an RPG into a watered down shooter that more people could enjoy, this time with no drama about it being a space porn simulator, and with a progressively worse story. Sony was touting a new title to show off the power of the Playstation 3, in the form of MAG. A Massive Action Game with 256 players battling in teams for supremacy on a gigantic battlefield. Had it not been shut down four years later, it could have served as an opportunistic approach to another trend.

Meanwhile, Darksiders was giving Zelda fans something they could admit to liking to their highschool friends. Alan Wake was finally being released after many years being a poster child for the power of DirectX 10, even though it was using DirectX 9. Heavy Rain made interactive movies interesting again. And Obsidian was given less than two years to make a sequel to Fallout 3, and somehow managed to pull it off, with New Vegas. Then, because a thing called Metacritic that counts review scores and adds them up in dumb ways, showed a total score of 79, Obsidian got shafted out of millions of dollars in bonuses by Bethesda. The studio also had troubles because of its other project, Alpha Protocol, an espionage RPG with some really good ideas, a few horrible ones, and a lot of problems that were never fixed.

2010 was when World of Warcraft entered a new phase of its life, by destroying the old world and bringing in a new one. Cataclysm swept away what people were used to for the past 6 years, and brought in a new landscape, a new experience, and managed to alienate about 5 million people in the process. Even so, it was still the most popular subscription MMO. It still is. So popular that MMOs started going free to play, and adding microtransactions just to keep relevant. That’s something that Dungeons and Dragons Online had done the previous year, and months later it had over 1 million players, and was considered a massive success. It showed the world that there was an alternative. A way to compete with World of Warcraft. Naturally, this idea was known for years in the Asian market, but this was news to the westerners. Especially since this wasn’t a cheap MMO. But some still tried to compete, like Star Trek Online, banking on the popularity of its brand. It wouldn’t have much success either, until it went free to play. And to this day, that is how most MMOs stil manage to operate in the face of World of Warcraft. Even once best selling games went this route, Quake 3 being re-imagined as an on-line only shooter, running through a browser, in the form of Quake Live.

That idea, of running a game through a browser. A game that wasn’t made in flash, started getting traction. The On-Live service went on-line, a method that could allow people to play games by streaming a video feed of it running off a dedicated server. Internet connections around the world weren’t robust enough for it at the time. They still aren’t, but we’re getting there. To cloud gaming.

The dwindling middle market was still trying it’s best, on PC there at least, in the console space, it was still go big or go home for established studios. The creators of the Penumbra series managed to create a well paced horror game in the form of Amnesia Dark Descent. Mount and Blade Warband was released, as one of the greatest mounted combat games ever made, proving Bethesda was still full of crap when it said it couldn’t do mounted combat in Oblivion. The creator of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, brought us Deathspank, a parody of the hack and slash RPG that mixed good action with a lot of self aware humor. And, sure some disaster, like the troubled Elemental War of Magic, that promised the world and delivered more than the engine could actually handle, leading to numerous problems, months of redesign and two free games to anyone that bought it. In its defense, it had a budget equal to the intro video of the recent Civilization 5. A game that simplified maybe a few too many things, and yet improved others by adding hexes that could only be occupied by one unit.

But what was really setting the world on fire was the indie scene. Limbo came out, a platformer that managed to leverage its outstanding visual style to great success. VVVVVV was a quirky not-plaformer that still managed to be one. Then there was Super Meat Boy. A platformer that was priding itself on being difficult. Annoying, even, but inventive enough to make people interested. And it fed into the growing anti-casual counter-culture trend to great success. But the thing that was really blowing up was Minecraft, selling around 4000 copies in february, and about 670 thousand by December. In another year it would be four million, and many millions would have played it, what with all the piracy.

The game of 2010 is without a doubt Fallout New Vegas. I say this because it represented two very important things. It was the old age of video games trying to fit into the new one. A game that took the shape it had to and still sell in this age, but tried to spread ideas of the old world, if you will. It made due with what it could. And what it had wasn’t much. Because Bethesda gave the studio very little to work with. Just 18 months to create a massive game, with no time for testing, no care put into making a functional game. It didn’t matter to the publisher that the developer needed more time to finish it without working themselves to the bone. What mattered was that Bethesda had a game out, quickly, to capitalize on the success of Fallout 3. Speed and profit, and then doing its best to shirk away from giving the developers their due. That was the video games industry in the AAA sector. A giant maw, grinning, waiting to chew up anyone foolish enough to put their trust into it. And that hasn’t really changed.

Next week, we’re in for some arrows, guard your knees. Goodbye.

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