T w e n t y S i d e d

My column this week serves two purposes. First, I wanted to acknowledge the bad timing of my article two weeks ago when I praised Anthem just before a flood of news stories revealed that things were worse than they seemed on the surface. Secondly, I wanted to shine a light on Warframe because it really is strange how little attention the game gets.

Every week is a new discovery of something cool that Warframe does, followed by a new annoyance that makes me ragequit. I keep getting disgusted, storming off, but then coming back because I miss the gameplay. Nothing else feels this fluid. I don’t mean “it feels good for a grindathon looter-shooter”, I mean the game feels good to play, period. While you do spend a lot of time working towards long-term goals, I hesitate to call it a “grind”. I associate grind with static gameplay against repetitive enemies in the same environments, and Warframe is the opposite of that. It’s so good I keep forgetting just how annoying it is, and so I have to come back every day so I can be reminded of why I quit yesterday.

I don’t know if that’s a criticism or an endorsement, but that’s where I’m at with this game right now.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Warframe is Strange Fun”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’m sorry to say that if you’re a long time reader of this site, then my column this week is just a shorter, more focused version of a rant you probably read two years ago. Still, this is sadly an evergreen topic and revisiting it every couple of years is probably not overkill.

I’d love it if gaming culture would focus more on EA’s flagrant mistakes and less on the catch-all term “greed”, because greed is such an easily dismissed term. If you’re an aging executive, then an outcry regarding greed falls perfectly into the horrible stereotypes about Millennials that are popular among Baby Boomers. Meanwhile, the criticism of, “This obviously bad decision destroyed IP that was worth hundreds of millions of dollars” is a lot more damning outside of gaming culture.

Based on the feedback at the Escapist, this argument seems to have fallen of deaf ears. I think a big reason for this is that we don’t all complain about game companies for the same reason. For a lot of people, calling EA out regarding greed is an act of catharsis and they don’t particularly care if their argument is persuasive. They’re just venting frustration. For me, critical analysis is an attempt to explain a mistake so that people will stop making it. If an executive or a shareholder ever read my work, I’d want them to find it instructive and illuminating. “Ah! So it’s not that gamers are entitled babies, it’s that EA is releasing products that hurt sales and damage their brand!”

Having said that, it’s likely that we’re both just shouting into the hurricane. Some people complain about greed and I complain about lost revenue potential, but the odds against a shareholder or an executive reading what any of us have to say is astronomicalParticularly since they seem so disconnected from gaming culture..

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “EA’s Problem Isn’t Greed”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.