In the race to release the next best-selling game, developers seem to cut corners in both gameplay and in narrative. One need only look to “Army of Two” to see this. Two burly men with guns have zero interest in anything except killing and talking to one another. This can usually be ignored if it were not for the fact that you have an NPC as a sidekick who dies. Often. There are points in the game where you need help getting up onto a block. On the other side of that block are men. With guns. Who shoot you. A lot. If your NPC buddy (who may or may not be gay but the idea of two men wielding big guns and not having any interest in the only female character featured in the game is a bit iffy) can run over to you and heal you or vice versa. Unfortunately, “Army of Two” is only one example which I will get to into since I have a larger message to get at.
It seems that every NextGen game that is on its way is either advertising based on the premise of phenomenal graphics, or the ingenious use of the NextGen engines provided by the X-Box 360, the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii. In my opinion this is quite futile. For one, they are advertising something the consumer is well aware of, and that is the fact that the games will be “better” which is the basis for countless console sales. And, two, better visuals does not instantly mean better gameplay or overall quality of a game. Yes, “Uncharted: Drake's Fortune” looked fantastic, but it can hardly be considered a good game (especially considering its about a smug white boy running around shooting natives).
The fact of the matter is that designers are not putting as much into the story as they are the visual appeal of the game. Sorry if I don't base my level of excitement for a game on the graphics, but you'll recall that sentences like “great visual appeal” and “best we've seen so far” were used when “Golden Eye” was first released for the N64. I personally think that video games look as good as they can get without becoming self-destructive in that they defy their own purpose. If such vanities in video gaming continue I wouldn't be surprised to see companies advertise that games allow players to actually feel and live in the video game offering a literally real experience involving sight and smells and touch and a whole cavalcade of bullshit that defies the purpose of video gaming.
Video games are an escape. They are supposed to allow a player to be a character that interests them, or be a character that they know they could never be in real life (for some reason Kratos from the “God of War” series is coming to mind). Video games are supposed to be like taking acid, in that you go on a trip. But unlike drugs, after playing a video game you don't wake up in a tree without pants and a squirrel in your mouth. Like drugs, however, there are bad trips. Sometimes video games aren't up to par and are a disappointment when you're finished.
This is the case more and more often with video games and will be a bigger problem for gamers as the more NextGen games are released. Competition amongst the PS3, Wii and X-Box force developers to cut corners in story and gameplay in order to get the product out before the another company releases its “next big game”. When game script writers and game designers work more as a team and less as two separate divisions of the development process, then perhaps gamers will be having fewer “bad trips”.
