This week’s column concerns a topic we’re all exposed to, since we’re in the midst of holiday release season: hype. The sheer amount of hype being pushed by PR representatives, avid fans, or just word-of-mouth is enough to flush any thought of anything but upcoming releases from my mind. This week is particularly laden with lavish praise for new releases, since it carries both Modern Warfare 3 and Skyrim to gamers’ eager hands. You’re probably familiar with both titles after their long buildup in our collective consciousness, though perhaps Skyrim more than MW3.
Expectations for new games can either be a blessing or a curse once the community actually begins to play the games and talk about them. I’ve seen many a game praised for having gone above and beyond popular expectations, while games touted as “game of the year for all years” turned out…less than exciting, or even totally without redeeming value.
Usually when a new game comes down the line with a mix of compliment and criticism, gamers are more likely to have a well balanced, more realistic idea of what the game will be. But if a game receives nothing but 15 out of 10 star reviews, it has nowhere to go but down.
I am certainly guilty of buying games based on hype without ever actually having played the game. (Looking at you, Red Faction: Armageddon.) Marketing strategies for modern games rival military invasion plans in complexity and number of people involved. Gamers are drip-fed bits and pieces of information leading up to the release, building excitement sky-high with carefully-manipulated tidbits of information.
Some games take a more serious approach to this than others; see Skyrim‘s live action trailer/commercial compared to Saints Row: The Third‘s commercial spoofing both Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. There are guerilla approaches to building expectations utilizing viral advertising campaigns, like using secret websites found only by clues hidden in trailers,. Then there’s the more direct approach of tacking on in-game-rewards to products like Mountain Dew and Doritos.
But some of the best efforts of what are probably million dollar advertising campaigns go to waste when a new game meets a less-than-stellar reception from the community. A particularly recent example of this is Modern Warfare 3, the brand-new (in the last 24 hours kind of new) first-person-shooter entry in the Call of Duty franchise. While as a sequel it is understood MW3 shares common themes, features, or environments with its predecessors, it seems that MW3 might have gone a step too far in borrowing from its predecessors, given its mixed reception from the community.
In the initial reception to Modern Warfare 3, we can see what happens when expectations fail to hold true to what the actual game offers. This isn’t to say that MW3, or others like it, are bad, just that they failed to live up to the promised grandeur of the hype.
There are also times where a game doesn’t feed into the hype machine, and still garners a massive popular following. Dead Space happens to one of my favorites. This is a title that played it safe, and skulked up like so many a necromorph on the player. Without the hype prejudicing expectations, the game could speak for itself once released.
While I am tempted to go ahead and say Skyrim falls into this category, since no commercial is long enough to actually present anything close to a preview of what each player can do in so massive a game, the newest Elder Scrolls title is running a rather large PR campaign to make its name a household word for the next few weeks.
Perhaps it is up to us, the community, to stop putting so much stock in reviews, commercials, promotions, or giant banners on the sides of buildings as a source of our excitement for a game. It would be wiser to turn to any videos or any hands on experience we might find before release as the basis for our expectations. The radical notion of relying on actual in-game footage as evidence instead of a pre-rendered cinematic running in the background while some “fortunate” developer or PR representative talks excitedly into the camera might be just too crazy; but one can hope.
I might be giving the commercials too much credit in terms of their ability to persuade people the upcoming game will be the best game ever in the history of interactive entertainment. But when I see gamers getting upset that Modern Warfare 3 has more than its fair share of copied-and-pasted content from Modern Warfare 1 & 2, it suggests those gamers thought the newest entry in the series was going to be something new and different, instead of a rough addition of content to a formula five years old.
Expectations for new games are what make midnight releases and unwrapping that deceptively-difficult sealed plastic as much fun as they are. I will more than happily tolerate commercials, the occasional paid-for review, and general hype in order to continually experience the Christmas morning excitement I get every time I buy a new game. That being said, I would rather be that excited for two or three games a year, not experience it every new release only to rapidly find my hopes crushed as the new game in my possession proves not to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Perhaps this will just require me to turn a blind eye to certain commercials, or the impossible review scores some games receive, but maybe, just maybe, the community will grow to compensate for game marketing and overblown expectations. I can certainly dream of it.