Bang! Turn-Based is Dead!
I’m starving amid plenty.
We got the latest issue of Games for Windows today. The cover story reads “Too many games! PC games invasion.” As far as that statement goes, it’s entirely true, but it fails to depict the computer game landscape accurately.
By all accounts, 2007 has been an extraordinarily good year for computer games. Contrary to the usual pattern of mediocre-to-good offerings surrounded by wild hype, this year we were treated to a long list of smash successes, the kind of thing that has players skipping meals and calling in late for work. Bioshock did a lot with a little, brilliantly turning the limitation of linearity into a driving narrative element. I haven’t seen Gears of War, Half-Life 3, or Halo 3, nor would I be qualified to judge them if I did, but all are getting stellar reviews. Delayed games have been declared worth the wait. Hardcore fans suspicious of any deviation with the Team Fortress formula have decided that Team Fortress 2 was right to remove grenades, and otherwise reduce technical variations. Mass Effect is doing for consoles what these are doing for computers, bringing a compelling narrative and tactical depth to what would otherwise be a stale genre.
Unfortunately, one can’t help but notice a pattern here. All these games are first-person shooters (often abbreviated to “FPS,” or just “shooters.”) Of the seven games named on the cover of this month’s GFW, five are shooters; one is the failed SimCity Societies (see my review), and one is a garden-variety RTS. When Eileene and I visited Best Buy this week, the games section read: shooter, shooter, shooter, shooter, Sims, shooter, Civ4, shooter, shooter, Sims, shooter, shooter, shooter, shooter, WoW, shooter. It's like going to the grocery store and finding eleven aisles of pasta but only broccoli in the produce department.
If you like shooters, welcome to hog heaven. The shelves are packed with shooters, and many of them, I’m told, are excellent. About the only drawback to this embarrassment of riches is that it’s hardly possible to enjoy them all properly before they become obsolete.
If you’re not into shooters, however, you’re up the creek. World of Warcraft scored a hit with its Outland expansion, with the same across-the-board quality that made the original such a success, but it is, ultimately, an expansion. Despite the consistently high quality of the WoW line, I quit this month out of boredom; you can only drill through an end raid so many times once you hit the level cap. Strategy gamers like me have had to warm themselves by the single light of a Civilization expansion. The most original game of the year, and possibly its best, is Portal, combining black humor with teleportation puzzles, and it was a spin-off of a shooter, built entirely around a special gun deemed to powerful for its Half-Life parent.
This, too, shall pass. There’s no guarantee that the pendulum will swing back; it might swing off towards an entirely new genre I can’t conceive—but it will swing somewhere when shooters run out of fresh ideas. Still, in a game industry fallen prey to a blockbuster mentality, hungry to exploit both PC and console for revenue, and eager to exploit the vast promise of ever-broader internet bands, the shooter is choking the life out of other game genres. And for those of us huddled around the embers of Civilization, pickings look to grow even slimmer.