FastLikeLightning
Home-Town Zero
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2013
- Messages
- 977
- Reaction score
- 451
- Points
- 63
- Location
- The Dumpster Out Back
- Steam
- FastLikeLightning
- PSN
- MarioMan7172
I think saying that 'Dumb memes can kill games' is, well, not entirely false, but I feel like that's sort of missing the forest in the trees. For example, I don't think anyone would disagree or be surprised if you said that, for example, a really shitty PR run could kill a game, because that's sort of inarguable, and a lot more accurate to the actual story. Let's all be honest here, MvCI had some pretty shit PR, and I don't think anyone could realistically say otherwise.
I'd also say another reason could have been a very traditional one in all forms of media, which is 'If the people who are making a project don't care about the project, why should the people who buy it?'. It's pretty clear that MvCI was rushed, likely by Marvel and Disney, to be little more than a cash-in for the MCU based on a semi-popular video game series with name recognition. It's an ad, basically, and everything from the models and the voice acting (Dear god the voice acting), to the music, to the roster picks make it pretty clear that more or less nobody on the project thought of it as anything more than an ad. If the people who are making the thing clearly don't really care all that much, then there's no reason why the average consumer would care that much either. You can argue that marketing and graphics and music and sound design and user interface, all of those are secondary to the admittedly good gameplay, but that's just not really how that works. Sure, they're less important, but them being bad still brings the game down, and not just for a casual viewer.
Saying that 'Gameplay is all that really matters' is taking a very reductive view on the act of game development. It's like saying that 'Writing is all that matters for a movie', because while writing is very important, and a film with poor writing is almost certainly going to be bad, but a film with amazing writing isn't automatically great. Everything comes together to create the whole experience, and when the majority of the things that come together are straight-up bad, even if the core element is done well, is still a bad product.
I'd also like to point out that there are a lot less arcane reasons that the game is failing. Probably the most obvious: why the fuck is it $60 USD? 80% of the roster is an asset flip from UMvC3, with only 6 new characters in the bunch. There was some remodelling to them to fit the new artstyle, but I think most people with eyes would agree that the remodelling was kind of shit, and poorly done. The story mode, if you haven't played it, isn't something that could be reasonably described as 'high budget'. Keep in mind, $60 USD was also the asking price for, say, Injustice 2, which has great graphics, good gameplay, and a Story Mode that people clearly really worked hard and put a lot of money into. It's also the asking price for Tekken 7, a game with, once again, great graphics, and a good character roster, and great gameplay. The game is horrendously overpriced, and that's probably why it's failing as hard as it is, straight up. Having DLC practices that were considered unbelievably scummy even 5 years ago also probably isn't helping that at all.
I'd also say another reason could have been a very traditional one in all forms of media, which is 'If the people who are making a project don't care about the project, why should the people who buy it?'. It's pretty clear that MvCI was rushed, likely by Marvel and Disney, to be little more than a cash-in for the MCU based on a semi-popular video game series with name recognition. It's an ad, basically, and everything from the models and the voice acting (Dear god the voice acting), to the music, to the roster picks make it pretty clear that more or less nobody on the project thought of it as anything more than an ad. If the people who are making the thing clearly don't really care all that much, then there's no reason why the average consumer would care that much either. You can argue that marketing and graphics and music and sound design and user interface, all of those are secondary to the admittedly good gameplay, but that's just not really how that works. Sure, they're less important, but them being bad still brings the game down, and not just for a casual viewer.
Saying that 'Gameplay is all that really matters' is taking a very reductive view on the act of game development. It's like saying that 'Writing is all that matters for a movie', because while writing is very important, and a film with poor writing is almost certainly going to be bad, but a film with amazing writing isn't automatically great. Everything comes together to create the whole experience, and when the majority of the things that come together are straight-up bad, even if the core element is done well, is still a bad product.
I'd also like to point out that there are a lot less arcane reasons that the game is failing. Probably the most obvious: why the fuck is it $60 USD? 80% of the roster is an asset flip from UMvC3, with only 6 new characters in the bunch. There was some remodelling to them to fit the new artstyle, but I think most people with eyes would agree that the remodelling was kind of shit, and poorly done. The story mode, if you haven't played it, isn't something that could be reasonably described as 'high budget'. Keep in mind, $60 USD was also the asking price for, say, Injustice 2, which has great graphics, good gameplay, and a Story Mode that people clearly really worked hard and put a lot of money into. It's also the asking price for Tekken 7, a game with, once again, great graphics, and a good character roster, and great gameplay. The game is horrendously overpriced, and that's probably why it's failing as hard as it is, straight up. Having DLC practices that were considered unbelievably scummy even 5 years ago also probably isn't helping that at all.
