Gamers Complain Too Much!

I swear, every time a new game comes out that has high expectations is released and doesn't meet the standards of the consumers dream game, they get angry and immediately label the game as a bad release.

Maybe I'm just imagining this, but it does seem to happen quite often. I think we, as gamers, have become jaded as to the quality of video games. As video games have become more popular and advanced in technology over the years people are going to start expecting more, but at the same time I think we expect too much.

For example, a popular game released awhile ago, Gears of War 2, did not meet the gaming quality of the first game. While it certainly was not as good, it was by no means a bad game. Although when it was released people were content to give it a low score. Lower than it deserves. It was almost like people expected it to BE the first game. It isn't just GOW2 either, it has happened to other franchises and individual games as well. Sometimes people treated it more harshly JUST because of the hype. (For example: Spore)

What happened to that era of 16 and 32-bit games? If we had saw something like this back then, it would AMAZE us. We have all this new-fangled 3D imagery and super strong hardware to make these epic blockbusters that are released every other month or so. What did we have back in the day? 2D platformers, clones and clones of them and we never complained. Now all we've got are FPS after FPS as the norm but along with that we have all these amazing titles like Okami, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Scribblenauts, Little Big Planet, etc.

We have it better now than we ever have in the past. If people continue to complain this way, we will NEVER be satisfied.

What do you guys think? Do Gamers these days complain to much or what?

Back in the day there was no internet, no extra coverage on TV, no G4TV or whatever other game channels there are..therefore when we saw a game was coming out, what we saw was in the (short) preview on TV if there was one. We go out to the store to buy it when it comes out, not even knowing what to expect from the game..It's fact that if you have really low or no expectations for something, you'll like it or atleast learn to like it.

Nowadays, you can find anything out about a game coming out. Tons of previews are released, pictures, gameplay, so on and so forth. With all this stuff comes high expectations, and with all this stuff comes people's own "envisions" of the game. If I see some cool gameplay of CoD Black Ops I'm going to envision the game to be a certain way..then when I go get the game and play it it could be MUCH different from how I envisioned it, and it would be a letdown. There's also the fact that we see and play games that are GREAT, or shows flashes of greatness where games would only have to be tweaked to be even that much better. Then when sequels come out game dev's shy away from that stuff, change something big, change something big gameplay wise and essentially makes it "worse" , especially compared to expectations.

If you want to talk about sequels getting worse, it's just the circle of life..granted there *are* some sequels that are better than the original, but not much right? The thing with an original game is people will buy it, they'll hype it up. When the game dev. decides to make the sequel, they want to achieve even more buyers, so how do they do this? They dumb the game down a little bit so the new players that play the sequel first without playing the original, can jump right in and play and not get dominated.

It really goes both ways - gamers complain too much because game dev's try to add stuff to games to make it even better when all they need to do is tweak, essentially making it worse, and gamers put up extremely high expectations for everything new comes out..but guess what, not everything coming out is going to be bigger and better.

The fact is that developers are no longer nice. They lie to us, like they did with Heavy Rain. They make decisions so perverted that you wonder if the entire studio is just a nerdy S&M collective... I'm looking at you MW2. And they steal from us, giving us products which lack pretty fundamental facets of gameplay, such as Skate 3 needing a purchase before you can play other people's arenas, or Dragon Rising coming without a free roam, do-as-you-please mode. Codemasters made us pay for the ability to take a tour of a deserted island.

Simply put, I feel that I could do a better job as a head honcho in a studio than the current crop can, and that is not good. Imagine if you felt you could do a better job than your doctor. Thats how I feel, and that should not be. I can usually recognise another person's professionalism, but not with games developers. Not anymore.

I guess, you could eliminate a large quantity of complaints by just being honest with your players. There are more than enough people who will invest into a companies games if they are honest to keep the books in the black.

But companies don't want to just profit, they want to profit big, which requires super talented people or liars. The latter is cheaper to find than the former.

I completely agree with you shiver. I think gamers are getting more and more picky, myself included.

Take for example a game like Alpha Protocol. This was a game I was genuinely excited for a year ago, then once the reviews hit I assumed it was not worth my time. Luckily, Lance let me borrow the game and I figured I would give it a chance and I'm so glad I did. This game was one of the best RPG/Espionage experiences I've ever had. I dare say it did the spy game better than Splinter Cell Conviction.

I think if we can just learn to approach games with an open mind, we may find there are actually a lot of great games out there. They may not be a Mass Effect 2 or Uncharted 2, but they certainly are worthy to play while we are waiting for the next big blockbuster hit.

People just set the bar way too high up, it's ridiculous because in the end due to that high expectations there is no point in satisfying them.

You need drink one big cup of code red and everything will be okay.