Hi guys, I’m newdarkcloud and this week the Red Shirt Crew and I have decided to do a crossover this week. I’m posting something over here and MaristPlayBoy will be posting something over at my blog at Press Start to Discuss. Be sure to check over there if you like video games and talking about them. But enough about that, you are here for a blog post, so that is what you will get.
A couple of weeks back, there was a very well documented controversy surrounding Borderlands developer Gearbox and its recently released Aliens: Colonial Marines. As many of you are certainly aware, the game was released to absolutely horrible reviews, being almost universally lambasted by not only the gaming press, but also many fans of the Aliens franchise. However, quite a few people made note of an interesting little observation. That is, while Colonial Marines received (and quite frankly deserved) a ton of user backlash, it was not nearly as massive as was the one caused by the ending of the third Mass Effect game. Among those that noticed this, there were quite a few questions as to why this may be. This week, I attempt to find a rational explanation for this phenomenon and justify it. There are reasons for this difference. Though it may may seem like these two events are similar, subtle differences exist between them which I believe are the cause for these different reactions.
The first of these differences is the one of expectations between the two franchises. Simply put, people generally expected more out of the Mass Effect games than an Aliens game. It is not particularly hard to discern why this might be. If one were to just search for “Aliens” on Metacritic, they could see that, historically speaking, even before the release of Colonial Marines, games based on that franchise generally were not that good. By contrast, when one retrieves the same search results for “Mass Effect,” it would be clear that its track record is much stronger. These two histories result in two wildly different presumptions from their fans. When fans of the Aliens franchise saw that the latest game was actually incredibly bad and a horrible addition to the franchise, they were most likely used to this kind of disappointment. I have no doubt that they were upset when confronted with the cold slap of reality, but (and I am speculating here) it is likely that this anger was tinged with a feeling of “I should have known” given that there were only a few Aliens games did particularly well critically. This same thing cannot be said of Bioware’s beloved space-opera. Say what you will about the Mass Effect franchise (as I have repeatedly), but it cannot be denied that it is a very popular franchise that commands a fiercely loyal fanbase who expect the highest quality games. When people with expectations that high are disappointed, that passion they have tends to make them… react… violently. We saw that plain as day. As I can attest to from personal experience, the Mass Effect 3ending was just so disappointing for so many people because they expected so much from the franchise that anything less than good was going to cause massive outrage, let alone something that bad. To expect that same outcry from a franchise of such a lesser pedigree is almost naive in a sense.
A similar case can be made for the developers of the two games as well. Gearbox in particular took a very long time to even make a name for itself. Founded in 1999, Gearbox started as a group of 5 people who each had some experience in the industry coming together. The very first projects they worked on involved Half-Life, Valve’s legendary first-person shooter. It was Gearbox who ported the game to consoles and helped on the development of all of Half-Life’s expansion packs, even doing work on Counter-Strike. Later, in 2005, they created the Brothers in Arms franchise. While all of this at least sounds pretty impressive, it was not until the reveal of Borderlands that Gearbox was truly placed on the map. That game and its sequel were very well received, giving Gearbox a level of prestige and credibility it did not quite reach before. However, this was tempered with the release of Duke Nukem: Forever, which was purchased from 3D Realms and finished by them in order to acquire the license. For all of their years in the industry, Borderlands (and its sequel) and Duke Nukem: Forever are really the only games that people think of when they think of Gearbox. One of these franchises is more built for cooperative multiplayer and the other is pretty hated. All in all, not great. So when Aliens: Colonial Marines did poorly, it was not as big of a shock as it might have been from a larger, more well-known developer.
This is in stark contrast to Bioware, who is much more notable and significantly more appreciated, or at least was until recently. Bioware was founded a couple of years before Gearbox in 1995. Though they did make a game or two before, Bioware’s success began with the release of Baldur’s Gate in 1998, before Gearbox’s conception. 2 years later, the sequel received just as much acclaim as the original game, cementing Bioware’s reputation in the field. Following this, Bioware had a string of well-received games like Jade Empire, Neverwinter Knights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. All of Bioware’s most-well known games were quite successful and the company itself was, at the time, in a very comfortable position. While the Mass Effect franchise has certainly caused some heads to turn since the second game, it was also equally well received. When the third game was released and people began to see the ending, the poor quality of it juxtaposed over all of these many years of great games was really jarring and caused significantly more backlash than a lesser company would have received, setting aside debates regarding the talent of modern Bioware. Different developer pedigrees lead to different responses in the fans, which contributed to the difference between these incidents.
The last contributing factor towards the variance in fan outcry was the scale at which the two mistakes made by these two different developers occurred. While Gearbox managed to screw up an entire game, Bioware most noticeable blunder was at the very end. While some people (like me) would refer to the claim that the ending was the only problem as a disingenuous assertion, most people cite that they enjoyed “99% of the game, but really hated the last 1%” which is a perfectly reasonable opinion to hold. Anyway, the point is having a small, concentrated burst at the very end to an otherwise good, or at the very least decent, game actually feels worse than an entire game that was all awful, all the time. Again, this is just another form of playing with expectations. If a game is generally bad all throughout, then players can just either dismiss it and quit that game or otherwise get used to it as the game goes on. However, if the game is otherwise good until a point right until the end, that sets up a high expectation that the ending is going to be a least equally as good as the content preceding it. If it misses that mark as much as Mass Effect 3 did, then the sheer fact that it went so far below expectations can be hard for people to cope with internally, which results in a massive outcry from the fan that are upset about it all over the internet.
Speaking objectively, the problems with Aliens: Colonial Marines are obviously, significantly worse than the problems Mass Effect 3had. There is no question regarding that. However, the problem was that people expected much more from Bioware and as a result, it was much more painful to see an otherwise good game disappoint at the very end than to have a predictably crappy game be predictably crappy. Perception is a very big part of how people react to stimuli and the contrast between these two incidents is direct proof of that.
newdarkcloud is the writer of the awesome gaming blog Press Start to Discuss that you should totally go check out. His current projects include Disclosure Alert, a Let’s Play series that’s more than worth the watch. You can also listen to his podcast appearance on the RSC here.
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