Mar 5
What Game Would You Unmake?
Paul Barnett asks a mighty interesting question over at his MySpace blog:
What game would you unmake? What computer game would you unmake for the betterment of mankind. By ‘unmake’ I mean it never happened, it never got thought about and thus all the nonsense that followed, the games it influenced and so forth never come about.
So be careful with your choice, I mean you may end up killing off entire branches of game development, or are you just terminating a game you dislike, one you wasted too much time on? Would the world be better off if Myst never happened? Do we end up at a better place if Donkey Kong Conga never got made, are we happier as a race if we never got to play Populous? Imagine games without Sim City? Interesting thoughts…
So, what game would you unmake?
This is a hard one for me, because there’s one really obvious answer – the Shadowrun FPS. While I’ve tried to keep my bile and hatred for the game off of this site, my soul still weeps at the misuse of the Shadowrun IP that game represents. If Shadowrun as an FPS was never considered in the first place, what might have sprung up in its place?
The most likely answer: either nothing, or an RPG. Both, in my opinion, would be better than what we got. The Shadowrun game did have a few good ideas, ideas that would be lost for at least a little while if the game had never existed. “Cheating as a game mechanic” is kind of a cool concept. Still – yeah, would really rather that game was never spawned in the first place.
That’s the easy answer, though, and I try to make things hard on myself. If I had to pick another game, a more significant game to unmake, it would probably be at-launch EverQuest 2. Members of the development team have as much as admitted that making a sequel to an online world was pretty much a mistake. A better approach would have been to shut down EQ and relaunch it with a whole new engine and sensibility. Instead of the crappy not-EQ we got at launch, we could have had a true successor to the original.
Yes, it still would have fled in the face of WoW’s magnificence, but imagine if SOE had been trying more directly to get EQ players into the new version of the game. We might have had a team that approached the art instead of the graphics with a weather eye. We might not have a game that (to this day) bogs down beefy machines. If you’re looking to move over players that had been playing on crappy machines, you’re more about the looks than the crunch, right?
Imagine a game capitalizing on its one-time brush with 500,000 players, an SOE without fantasy-favouring player base split between two games. Don’t get me wrong – I love EQ2. But it took a helluva long time to get here. It’s a minor miracle that the game is as good as it is. So if I had to unmake a game, I’d like to see what the world was like without SOE’s 2004 folly.
Thanks for the great idea, Paul! Now you – yeah, you, the one that just read this. What game would you unmake?
6 comments6 Comments so far
Shenmue.
I have no idea why people keep bringing it up as a classic. It was crap when it shipped and looking back on it it’s still crap. Sure, it’s open ended. You can collect toys and play video games all you like. But what’s the real game play? A big chunk is quick reponse events, a plague that now infests far too much of our gameplay. Any sudden “Quick hit this button, or else we’ll make you redo this section” is utter bullshit and Shenmue was full of them. The combat system was mediocre. As an adventure game it was simplistic. And, wow, a game where you can, and indeed must, get a boring job moving crates around. I’ve frequently watched a kung-fu movie in which the hero much avenge their father’s death and thought, “This is okay, but what would really make it rock would be hours of forklift driving.” Add in a multi-game storyline that we will likely never the end of of. All the time spent on the weather simulation, which is admitedly nice, could have been spent on delivering a complete story without the endless padding.
So what would happen in a world without Shenmue? At the very least, generally very good Resident Evil 4 would have been better for not having those blasted quick response events.
Easy: Halo. Halo has had enormous effects on the entire industry, and I haven’t liked a single one of those effects.
A close runner up is WoW. It is becoming increasingly clear that there isn’t room on the PC platform for much beyond casual games and WoW. That’s a sad state of affairs.
Third place goes to Doom. Doom begat the horde of mindless FPS clones and sequels under which we currently find ourselves buried.
Understand that I enjoyed each of these games in their time, and that my desire to unmake them doesn’t stem from any criticisms of the games or their construction. Hindsight, however, reveals their effects on the gaming ecosystem to be more negative than positive, to my eyes.
There WAS a Shadowrun RPG.
And it rocked.
They should remake it or do a modern sequel.
My first thought was also about Shadowrun.
I was very astonished when you mentioned it aswell!
It is an awesome IP. I can hardly believe what has been made of it until now (regarding computer games aswell as movies). It is really a pitty.
Same for Cyberpunk.
I remember two SR video games, both pretty solid, but they are more than ten years old.
[...] You’re all so quick to tell us which games you’d love to see made, but how about unmade? Huh? Yeeeaa-aaahhh. Not so easy. If you had the chance to go back in time and unmake one game, which would it be? Warhammer Online dev Paul Barnett’s asking the question over on his blog, and boy, it’s a doozey. Do you pick one for the shitty genre it spawned? For spoiling a franchise you once held dear? For plain old major suckage? Me, I’m going for Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (Shenmue, you came second by *this* much, with Wing Commander Arena coming in third). What game would you unmake? [Paul’s blog, via MMOG Nation] [...]
They should unmake Star Wars Galaxies so that I wouldn’t have gotten jaded about video games in the first place.
Also, I found it interesting that this site uses the original theme version of the one I use at my website. :)