2011.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

2011 was a year of extremes and a polarizing one at that. In this age of social media and connectivity, everyone was busy building a shell around themselves, making sure that only what agreed with them was visible to them. This would turn out to have some really bad consequences later down the line. And you could see the first signs already, if you looked carefully.

But not a lot of people were looking. News that the perpetrator of the September 11th attacks was finally found and killed grabbed a lot of attention. And most were too busy reeling from the disaster that hit Japan. An earthquake of magnitude 9 occurred off the coast, causing a giant 40 meter tall tsunami, alongside smaller giant waves, to smash into the south eastern part of the country. It caused over 15 thousand deaths and hundreds of billions in damage. But most of all, the waves destroyed the safety measures put in place to prevent a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. It became the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, leading to a massive radiation leak, a large area of contamination, and years of cleanup needed. And when it wasn’t a natural disaster that brought horror to people, it was the actions of man himself. Public shootings reached an alarming new record, children being targeted both in the United States and in Norway. Hope was fading for many.

People were enraged, they were discontent, and they began to manifest it through riots, like the ones in England, or more peaceful, but mass protests, like the Occupy Wall-street movement. One that aimed at first to force the end of the financing sector’s influence on politics, following the 2008 crash of the economy, for which no one had yet been punished. To stop the control of the 1% on the other 99%. As the months went on, the movement started drifting in different directions, becoming an incubator for slacktivism culture, the social justice culture, and the idea that you don’t have to accomplish anything as long as you scream long enough on social media. But that very same social media was being used by other people, throughout northern Africa and the Middle East by people that seemed to be very upset with their governments, leading to the Arab spring. An event that in some places brought change for the better, and in others brought unending civil war, grief and a human disaster with consequences we are still feeling. That spirit of change, of wishing a new order, was in many places in 2011, even in Romania. It didn’t work here. Nothing ever does. This whole affair was sort of prophecied by Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, 12 years prior, and its prophecies about the impact of the flow of information on society would continue.

The space Shuttle Discovery flew for the last time, ending the program forever. To this day, there is still no replacement for it. And even though billionaires may promise the stars, currently, we bow our heads to the ground, or try and explore space in Kerbal Space Program. A small little game released while still very much in early development by a small studio named Squad. It was a game built to be educational, by trying to be accurate, and in its niche of building/exploration games, it would become a giant. A force for good, giving hope to people that were so disillusioned with the progress of space travel, that they would soon begin to believe that the world is flat.

Kerbal Space Program was not a game to polarize people. But there were a lot in 2011. Take Duke Nukem Forever, for example. A game that everyone will tell you was a total disaster. A misguided attempt to continue the development of a canceled and badly managed project that was being worked on for more than a decade. The result was a horrible, terrible game. But not according to the developer. Gearbox proceeded to not just ignore criticism, but downright reject it and placing the blame on people having the wrong expectations, or on the game not being fairly reviewed.
A bit of the opposite happened with Dragon Age 2. A game marketed heavily to spin the negative aspects of a rushed game, like recycled content, in a positive way, that toned down much of what made the previous title great, in hopes of making it more action oriented. The reaction from the fans was not all that positive. And yet, parts of the media were giving it scores of 10 out of 10, further cementing the idea that the gaming media didn’t really have the interest of gamers at heart. Instead, it was more concerned with catering to sponsors, which were represented mostly by the publishers who’s games were being reviewed. This idea didn’t come out of nowhere. I may have glossed over some of the incidents in the past year, like Gamespot editor Jeoff Gerstman being fired for giving a too low a score to Kane and Lynch. The traditional media was loosing its footing, especially because of the financial troubles around the world. Selling out was a way to stay in business and a better way to seal its own fate. Now, anyone could start a games site. But more importantly, there was video now. Youtube, especially, began to explode with gaming videos, game reviews, in-depth analysis videos. And while many had a variable level of quality, the top ones were exceeding anything that the traditional media was able to cr eate. And it did so without any of the baggage, the limitations or the sins of traditional gaming media.

But, of course, the most popular video game content creators would be the reaction camera screamers that would yell and make funny faces in order to better attract their main audience, 10 year olds. This tendency would extend to video game content streaming, through newly established services like Twitch Tv.

But back to actual games for a moment. 2011 gave us Skyrim. The most successful game of the Elder Scrolls series to date, continuing on the trend set by its predecessor of diluting the gameplay, simplifying it, reducing options and removing choice. But it was still a fun romp through Tamriel. Fun enough to sell millions of copies, to become what a generation identified as being Elder Scrolls, and then be remastered, resold and ported to every platform imaginable over the next decade, to the ire of people tired of a joke about being shot in the leg with an arrow.
At least it didn’t pander to the growing new trend of entertainment in general, that of shoving zombies at every turn. For that you would have games like Dead Island, and even indie titles like the still in development Project Zomboid and No More Room in Hell. Things would get more crowded on the zombie front quite soon. They’d also get crowded on the “this looks like game of thrones” front, because the new hit show inspired a lot of copycats and adaptations in terms of style very quickly. Even The Sims got in on the act, with The Sims Medieval, even though Electronic Arts would then release a Game of Thrones themed expansion for the Sims 3 instead, possibly out of confusion. Possibly because a Sims game that had more gameplay than incentives to buy DLC was not as popular as The Sims 3. Some companies, however, were trying to shy away from the trends they used to chase. Saints Row 3 became even less of a GTA clone by billing itself as a crazy game where crazy things will happen, and somewhere in there you may steal a car or two.

People disappointed by the constant watering down of games would be greeted by Dark Souls. A continuation of the idea of Demons Souls, but within its own universe and with its own particularities, like horribly broken physics. But it would be a game much celebrated by many, and with a lot of influence on the industry in the future. It carved out its own niche, that turned out to be a bit bigger than expected, leading many to try and copy it directly, or at least implement some of its ideas. Or that of its predecessor. One such game was The Witcher 2, inspired in gameplay more by Demons Souls than by the first Witcher, Assassin’s of Kings was released to the delight of fans of the original, and disappointment as well. Somehow, a developer that had only created PC games until now, succeed at creating a port of an Xbox game for the PC, before even making the Xbox version of the game. Fixing it would take time, but CD Projekt committed to it, and eventually did, rebuilding parts of the game completely.

And this wouldn’t be the only developer that would make such a commitment. It was rare, but for a brief moment in time, it seemed that the AAA sector understood that it’s OK to show support for the people that bought your games. Deus Ex Human Revolution was an astonishingly good game, considering when it was made, and the direction that mainstream RPGs were going. And yet, it had problems of its own. Problems that would be addressed in a remade version some time later. Sure, compared to the first Deus Ex it would still be a lesser game, but the effort was appreciated. And speaking of effort. LA Noire came out this year, a police investigation game with excellent facial animations, and made by a studio, Team Bondi, with management so horrible that it churned through employees in the hundreds over the course of 7 years of working 12 hour days. The practice would be lambasted by the press and by different organizations in the industry, but almost a decade later, it would still be the norm at many big studios.

After all, this was still the age of Go Big or Go Home. Well, not entirely. It was around this point that the indie revolution started to take root, with massively successful games of excellent quality, like Super Giant Games’s Bastion, an action game set on a very creative post-apocaliptic world, with excellent style and a narrator for all your actions. The Stanley Parrable, a simple mod at the time, had a similar idea, but it wasn’t an action game, instead being something far more experimental and surreal. Magicka wasn’t exactly indie, being published by Paradox, but considering the budget that Arrowhead Games had, it may as well be called an indie game. A very buggy and to this day barely functioning game, but one jampacked with humor and magnificent magic based combat. Achron was a game that tried to push the RTS genre to a new level, by introducing time traveling with time ripples that let you affect events in the past. And while the idea itself was magnificent, the RTS part wasn’t really all that great. Terraria latched on to the Minecraft craze, and gave you a similar experience, but in 2D and with bosses. Gemini Rue made for a very entertaining cyberpunk space adventure about assassins, secretive corporations and what it means to be yourself. And even some of the bigger publishers were catching onto the idea that maybe it’s OK to release games that don’t have a budget of 10 million dollars at a minimum. And so Ubisoft brought us an inexplicably poorly running god game, in the form of From Dust, and the best 2D platformer of its age, the beautiful Rayman Origins.

But what really set the stage for people realizing that maybe pouring all the money into a game was a bad idea, was Star Wars The Old Republic. A game that was released with much anticipation and a lot of marketing, having behind it a reported budget of around 200 million dollars and the Star Wars brand. Even so, it failed to meet sales and subscriber expectations. Not even the shut down of the once more ambitious Star Wars Galaxies would help, since for the most part The Old Republic was a story drive World of Warcraft clone with a Star Wars skin. In order to avoid shutdown, it would go free to play within a year. By 2013, it had yet to recoup its reported budget.

I could probably call this rampant example of hubris and budget creep the game of 2011, since it was symbolic of a disease within the games industry. Or LA Noire and its forced deathmarch to release. Or Duke Nukem Forver’s disaster. Or Crysis 2’s abandonment of everything that made the first one good, in a futile attempt to chance console success that lead to turning a once original game into a lackluster Halo clone. Or Deus Ex Human Revolution, as a way to show that there was a way to actually make a good game. Heck, Mortal Kombat made a magnificent comeback by rebooting a fighting game series with a focus on story that was beyond what anyone expected it to ever be. And Portal 2 managed to be a fantastic sequel to a game that many would have called perfect a few years before. Though some would say it was a needless sequel. It was, after all, a very polarizing time. But, no, the game of 2011 was Minecraft. It reached version 1.0 this year. It had sold millions upon millions of copies, and it created a few trends. The survival game trend, which people would latch onto for the next few years. The building game craze, to which more people would latch onto. The “graphics are giant cubes” trend, that every indie and small budget game seem to love. And with time, it would even bring about the Battle Royal craze.

Minecraft was played by a lot of children, so it is the driving creative force behind what will be the game developers of the future. And, naturally, it is hated because it is played by children by people that still want to pretend that they’re cool and won’t play anything without a brown filter on it. And it started the careers of many Youtube celebrities, mostly for the worse. But most of all, the giant success of Minecraft, with no marketing, with no promotion, with no boxed version, with no support from any store, with no publisher, with nothing but the support of people that wanted to play it, in spite of its primitive shape years before release, was the nail in the coffin for the control over the video games industry of the big publishers, for the giant retail stores and for the traditional media.

It was everyone’s game now, as the saying goes.

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