Genre Wars — the Downside of the RPG Takeover

Phaethon360 writes "From Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 to even Team Fortress 2, RPG elements are creeping into game genres that we never imagined they would. This change for the most part has managed to subtly improve upon genres that needed new life, but there's a cost that hasn't been tallied by the majority of game developers. 'The simple act of removing mod tools, along with the much discussed dedicated server issue, has made [MW2] a bit of a joke among competitive players. Gone are the days of "promod," and the only option you have is to play it their way. If Infinity Ward are so insistent on improving the variety of our experiences, they don’t have to do it at the expense of the experience that many of us already love. It really is that simple. If they don’t want to provide a good "back to basics experience," they could at least continue to provide the tools that allow us to do that for ourselves.'"

Comments

Re:RPG?

[jhoegl]

Uh... Wolfenstine 3d...

Scrub.

Re:Two issues here

[Jesus_666]

The first, simply put, is a "hot coffee" reaction. As certain countries (eg. Germany and Australia) adopt wildly restrictive attitudes towards video game content, developers are naturally more paranoid about being criticised (or sued) for game content that was actually added or unlocked by a third party mod.

Note that neither Germany nor Australia are at fault here. it's the United States.

Germany doesn't care about modding. Color all the blood green and remove and swastikas your game might contain and maybe tone down the gibbing a bit. Done*. We don't care if your game has tits or whether people can mod them in. We don't care whether people can use a game company-provided editor to make people bleed gallons of blood in swastika patterns. That's user-generated content and we pass our age restrictions based on what's in the package. I mean, we don't even care if there's a cheat code you can enter to turn blood back on (in fact, for a while "blood cheat" wa a staple of a German gamer's vocabulary). If the game as delivered doesn't have red blood and gibbing it's not that violent period.

In the USA, however, your game can end up getting torn to pieces because you have a modding tool that theoretically allows people to add nude textures to ingame characters. Somehow that affects people's opinions on the game. And suddenly the publisher has a case against releasing the dev tools.


* Granted, depictions of excessive violence dont need blood to net the game a restriction over here. But as long as you don't make a Manhunt clone you should be fairly safe.