Well. Maybe not. But here's Post Numero Dos for the week, which is all kinds of record breaking.
Prepare yourself for a shock of epic proportions: since I am unemployed, and spend all of my time at home, I have been playing many, many, many video games. (I know. It's out of character.) I just finished Atelier Iris 3 and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II (DA for short, since it's a monster name). While there are probably more pertinent questions (Why am I playing games instead of doing something useful? Why am I playing old games instead of new, shiny, pretty ones? etc.) I'm currently pondering the nature of game series and the developers' obligations to fans.
By and large, fans need to shut up and get over themselves in terms of what they feel they are "owed". Warcraft fans whine about server outages, because they are "owed" their precious playing time. Left 4 Dead fans felt they were "owed" an entirely new game via downloadable content. Halo fans feel they are "owed" an automatic win and the right to squat on a vanquished opponent's face. (Nobody's messed with that right.) However, after finishing Baldur's Gate, I also had an "I feel cheated" moment.
Baldur's Gate 2 is, duh, already a sequel. Oh, yeah, I should explain that: It's a SEQUEL because the developers decided they wanted to end the story halfway through Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance I and just pretend that DA2 was an entirely new game so that people would go out and buy a the product. (They also switched the platform and made the controls clunkier, as well as nixing the original characters, but meh.) Okay, fine. I had fun with Dark Alliance I, and the games are old enough that they didn't break the bank, so I ponied up for DA2.
There were some interesting changes (clunkier PS2 interface, more character options, more class options, way more incredibly irritating and cheap ways to die, terrible lighting, etc.), all kind of in tune with what you'd expect for an early 2000s RPG. Few gripes there. (Well...except for the lighting and cheap ways to die, but there you go.) However, I was kind of expecting an ending this time. You know...since I already got cheated out of my full story in DA 1. However, no. The story, once again, ends with Black Isle Studios thumbing their nose at me and saying, "Nyah, nyah. Fooled you again! There's another game continuing this story. Ha, ha. Go buy it."
...Except that they never made the game. There is no game. The game is a lie. And this pisses me off.
Neither DA1 nor DA2 were full games. They were very short. They were incomplete, and did not conclude the story in any way, shape, or form. The premise of the series is that you need to destroy an evil tower. (Shut up, it makes sense in context. We're not just against bad architecture.) The first game ends with the tower
...And there it ends. Apparently, Baldur's Gate just gets squashed by the tower and its evil undead, because there is no DA3. And, right or wrong, I feel cheated.
In a game whee there is no promised sequel, a sequel is a bonus. Atelier Iris was a great game, for example, and had a complete story...you know, with an actual ENDING. So, I was genuinely surprised to realize that there WERE sequels. Those were a nice extra. I didn't need a sequel in order to complete the story for the first of two games I'd already purchased and played. Each story stood alone. DA, though, is the opposite. Whereas Atelier Iris is a trilogy, each story is an independent saga. DA, by contrast, is kind of like Lord of the Rings. If you missed book 1, you have no idea what's going on in book 2. And, by extension, you also sort of need book 3 because neither of the other stories actually END.
DA, though, drops you in the middle of the story in both games. Adding in the additional annoyance of NOT HAVING a 3rd game is insult to injury. Going back to the Lord of the Rings analogy, it's as though you read to the middle of the fight in Mount Doom, and Gollum is going to grab the ring and oh no the world is going to end, and..."Oh, hey, guys, this is Tolkien. I'm bored with writing, so just, um...make up your own ending, 'k? Yeah. Yeah. I know you invested time and money into getting to this point in the story, but...yeah. Places to be, people to see. Peace out."
On the one hand, this was the developers' call. Wah wah, we're bored. We know we *promised* a 3rd game by putting a very blatant trailer as the sorry excuse for an ending in the 2nd game. But...waaaaaaah, we don't waaaaaaaanna make it. Technically, since this is their intellectual property, that's their call.
The other problem is that the game studio, Black Isle, was sold after DA2. However, this is hardly an excuse. Either they KNEW they were going to be sold as they made DA2, in which case they should have crafted a proper ending, or they were already working on DA3. In which case...why scrap it? The games did not sell badly.
So...what is a developer's responsibility to the buyer? Simple. If you promise something, deliver. It doesn't have to be to the "expectations" of the fans. (Left 4 Dead had downloadable content, for example. The studio delivered on their promise. The rabid fans wanted more, but they did get what they paid for. Oh...and they also DID get a FULL game.) Dark Alliance, though? The story involves getting rid of this tower and saving Baldur's Gate. I spent two games trying to get rid of the stupid tower and save Baldur's Gate. At the end of the second game, they show me a cutscene in which they (complete with melodramatic, "evil" lighting and music) introduce the head baddie, who announces that he is 1.) the last protector of said tower, 2.) completely in control of said tower, and 3.) going to take said tower to Baldur' Gate. So...while not a promise, that looks awfully like an, "Oh, hey, guys, the ending to the FIRST game you bought and paid for and played through and cared about, and the SECOND game you bought and paid for and played through and cared about, is going to be in this THIRD game which we just very blatantly stated will occur in order to provide a full story."
And...no delivery. And this is both annoying, since I have bought and played two of these stupid games and I want my ending right now kthx, as well as duplicitous. An RPG is story and character driven. It doesn't thrive on Mario Kart-eque multiplayer action. It's a full tale. A FULL tale. It needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. None of the Dark Alliance games had an end. They both shoved the ending off onto the prequel of the next game. They were also mad short, especially for RPGs. (9ish hours for DA1, 10 for DA2, if I'd avoided leaving the PS2 on while cooking.) You know why Lucas and Tolkien made their sagas trilogies? Because each part was really long. You can't turn a one-page short story into part 1 of a trilogy. (OK, you can, but it makes you either a brilliant con artist or a hack.) By chopping what was (I assume, since part 3 might have been a 150 hr magnum opus of an RPG) a 25-30 hour game into 3 segments and switching the platforms midstream (I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate it when studios do that, as it reeks of Sony whoredom), the company has raked in 2x the profits. (Would be 3x, if they'd bothered to do the 3rd one, but who's counting?)
Shenanigans. I call shenanigans. You're telling me the Suikoden crew can churn out a complete, 160,000 hour (ok, more like 80) game at the drop of a hat, and you can't release a 30 hour one in one installment?
In conclusion...grr. Seriously. I know what I'm doing, here. I'm one more idiot whining on the internet about a crazy, life-shattering thing that is a big deal just to just him/her. Still, though: what do studios think they owe fans? Does it differ by genre? Does it differ depending on the life stage of the studio? Yeah, okay. I'm probably bothered by this because I'm sitting on my butt for most of the day, and spend a lot of quality time with these RPG characters, but still. It wouldn't take much to provide closure. Hell, it doesn't even need to be a real ending attached to a real game at this point. Just send a guy with an effigy of a tower, and symbolically burn it. A note, on a website of repute, stating that everything is well in Baldur's Gate, and they are selling little chunks of the tower encased in glass as tourist souveniers, a la the Berlin Wall. You know...something.
On that note, I'm going to go get
1 comment:
I myself always claim that I have a right to get a complete story out of any game I play. You can have sequels, even sequels that tie in really tightly to the previous games — the Myst series comes to mind — where each component technically stands on its own. None of this cliffhanger capitalist nonsense where they're blatantly trying to get more money out one premise. For Pete's sake, let's have some standards, eh?
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