On 06/09/2014 at 08:14 PM,
by
Matt Snee
I was chilling watching my twitter feed when Mothman commented that every year he gets excited about E3, only to be disappointed that all the games are about people shooting each other. I responded that that is why I mostly play ramshackle unpolished indie PC games. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love shooting people too, but I gave up waiting for consoles to dazzle me. I’m just not the target audience. I mean, I love games like Skyrim, and Left 4 Dead, and Red Dead Redemption, and many other AAA games. But I’ve just kind of burned out on shooters. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them, I just have played them up to here, and am waiting for them to do something new. Now, I haven’t played Titanfall, and I heard that brings a lot of new things to the table (except for the aesthetic, which is bland as a Saltine cracker). But as I watched the show open up today with Microsoft’s conference and they showed the new COD, all I could think of was, is this Halo? Modern Warfare was an amazing game, and some of the other iterations of COD have been okay (though not warranting their success), but why are shooters become more and more this one, homogenized Halo-esque sci-fi thing, bereft of ideas? I am excited for the Halo collection they announced, I would love to play Halo 2 again (the last place I enjoyed the franchise) but I guess I need an Xbone first. Maybe I’ll get one though. Who knows. But what I’m really complaining about is the fact that all of these shooters seems to be melting into one generic experience – it used to be COD was about WW2 or Modern Quake-like gunplay, and then you had Halo for sci-fi, and then you had Battlefield for more war like experiences. Now they all seem to be congealing into one lame sci-fi vision with the same dropships, same guns (didn’t that gun in COD today look like it was Halo’s assault rifle?), and same little cut scenes. Sigh. Anyway, that’s where I’m at.