And I Will Walk Five Hundred Miles
Maybe it is just something a few of us have noticed but it seems like every AAA game these days features more and more forced walking segments. These are segments which pull you out of the action and make you walk (and listen) as the game is telling you the story. Red Dead 2, for instance, does it constantly. Likewise, God of War features a steady dose of these segments. Granted, sometimes this is the only way devs can tell such complex stories; however, we’d like to see a little less of this in 2019. Like one of our writers said: “The purpose of the interactive medium is to get the story across through interaction, not sitting you down to tell you some story before letting you get back to playing”.
You Give Love a Bad Name
Can we get some better names for these sequels, please? One of the worst and most disappointing trends of 2018 has to be sequels that just steal the name of the original; almost like original never existed. Super Smash Bros. aka Super Smash Bros. 4 is probably the worst ever offender, but this year featured God of War and Spider-Man. Two of the biggest games of the year couldn’t even come up with an original name. As our man, Jake Hill said: “Shooters have been getting lousy with this too! Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was, depending on how you count, the 8th installment of that series. Then you get World at War and then Modern Warfare 2, which if you count World at War (and I do), certainly makes the next one Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2. Then you get the cycle of Black Ops and Modern Warfare sequels until you get Call of Duty: WWII was otherwise known as just a regular sequel to the original Call of Duty series followed up with… Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. The 15th game released for consoles. And you call the 13th main Battlefield game Battlefield 1, which is cheeky and then you follow that up with… Battlefield 14: Battlefield V?”
No Mo Emotes
Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe I am just a cranky old man suffering from “get off my lawn” syndrome but I don’t get emotes. They serve no purpose. Yet I am supposed to get excited when I unlock one of these and kids are apparently rushing to buy emotes in games. Like seriously WTF?!? It was bad enough Fortnite had them and now they have leaked into the Call of Duty series. Black Ops 4 has them, Fallout 76 has them and so does Destiny 2. They suck and certainly stand as one of the worst trends in gaming this year.
Modern Day Sweatshop
Rockstar founder Dan Houser opened up a shit-storm when he talked about the working conditions at the studio and how his devs were working 100 hour weeks. There was more to the quote than that and some back-peddling on Houser’s part but the comments opened up some serious dialogue on social media. While the “100 hour crunch” was supposedly voluntary, many employees came forward and stated that they felt that if they didn’t work these insane hours, they feared they would be reprimanded or even lose their jobs. Since the news broke, we learned that this practice was somewhat commonplace with many AAA studios. This isn’t a new shitty trend in gaming but it certainly has received more press than years past and is disappointing to hear about all these horror stories from hard working devs.
You Can’t Hide Your Lying Eyes
The news of former IGN staffer Filip Miucin plagiarizing is certainly one of the things that sucked in gaming in 2018. We have all come to trust the work of IGN writers, so when the news broke, we all felt violated to a degree. Filip’s response to the incident wasn’t exactly helping either. For those of you who don’t know, Filip Miucin (now known as the infamous IGN plagiarist) originally came under fire for his Dead Cells review back in August. Following the allegation that he had ripped off a Youtuber’s review, it was discovered that he had done this more than once. IGN promptly canned Filip and we haven’t heard much from him since.
So there you have it, our list of things that sucked in gaming this past year. What bothered you this year? What did we miss? Tell us in the comments below.