Thought I’d share another poignant email with you all. This one is from BASHandSlash.com reader, y0da
Hey Jock,I remember the first podcast I ever heard was the one where Robert Bowling broke the news on IWnet. I know I found BASHandSlash.com far too late but I wanted to say thank you for all you have done. What’s making me write this email is the fact that the site is, well, different.I haven’t visited it in a while and over the summer it was just depressing to see that nothing new was posted. I understand completely why you took a break and frankly, I’m surprised you brought back BASHandSlash.com like you did. When I saw the new site I was shocked. This may sound a bit nerdy, but I would always spend hours looking through all of the old CoD4 configs and tweaks you had posted, it got to the point where I started to memorize some of them. I then realized after reading your article about the thought of uninstalling CoD4 that by changing BASHandSlash.com it shows that there is going to be the start of something new and great, something that could possibly revitalize the community once again. I hate to be an optimist here, but I believe that the old memories of PC gaming can and will be revived one day.Because of you, I started up my own group called PC Gamers United. We gained over 2,000 members within a 1 month period and took a stand against IWnet. Sadly, more than 80% of the group, including myself, bought mw2. From then on I lost all credibility with the group and it has been a ghost town ever since.I guess what I’m getting at is that I miss the memories from the “old days” and BASHandSlash revived those memories. My days don’t go back as far as yours as my first PC game was CoD1 back in 2005. But I’ll tell you, I really miss hanging out with people and playing just for fun. I rushed for hours on mp_harbor rifle servers and those are memories I will never forget. Call of Duty 4 was in my prime and I loved that game more than anything. Since no one plays it anymore, my clan has been struggling to find a game since CoD4 and sadly the quality of in-game memories has really diminished over the years.Thank you for your years of service. You don’t know how much it has meant to so many people.
~Patrick (y0da)
Another awesome email, thanks Patrick. While I sit here downloading the new Hedone North America Beta (a F2P shooter), I’m going to follow up yoda’s comments with some of my own.
Shock and Awe
The decision to step away from the AAA FPS scene, at least in the short term, took some time to arrive at, but I’m glad I backed away. I know it must be a bit of a shock if you haven’t been as close to “the FPS scene” as I have been for the past five years, but frankly, it was all highly predictable and probably overdue.
The When
I am not sure when I began to realize that playing and/or following AAA FPS games was becoming infuriating, but I know that I wasn’t the first in the community to begin thinking this way. In fact, many folks I know have already moved away from FPS…far, far away.
For example, let’s delve into the Call of Duty universe . Did I become annoyed with CoD before or after Modern Warfare came out? I do seem to remember getting CoD4 and thinking ‘why did the multi-player component of the game, a component I spend 99.9% of my gaming time playing, become less fulfilling an experience than the previous title’? CoD2 (and probably CoD:UO before it) had awe-inspiring game mechanics and you had to be quite skilled to play. Sure, there were problems and glitches with CoD2, glitches that I thought would simply be corrected by CoD4. Who would have thought that the game’s developers would refocus the basic elements of the game to a completely different group of gamers. It was classic bait and switch, as far as I was concerned.
CoD4 made a sharp left turn from CoD2 and that direction caused me and many old-time gamers that I played with to pause and regroup. Having said that, the truth is that CoD4 inspired many, many more people to play than it chased away. For that reason, I gave MW a second chance, but only began to like it once the game was modified by the community into Promod. I don’t think I would have ever, ever, played it for as long a duration as I did, if Raf1 had not made Promod and allowed CoD4 to become a competitive game.
The seeds of the change you see growing at BASHandSlash.com were planted back in CoD4. Like changing direction in an oil tanker, it has taken a long time to make the move.
The Why
While I have already tried to explain the reason ‘why’ I decided to show less interest towards AAA-titles in previous posts on here, let me see if I can throw in some bonus arguments for y0da.
- Abandonment
Many of the AAA games I supported in the past, have abandoned me. For example, at one point in time, you definitely could describe me as a CoD-disciple; unfortunately for me, CoD has gone through a slow evolutionary change since my interest peaked back in CoD2. Now, it has just become something too alien for me to enjoy anymore. For that reason I have decided to abandon it in return. You should not need to play a modded game immediately after release, but I found CoD’s gameplay so irritating that I longed to play the Promod version of every release after CoD4 . If you find that you have to play a modded game right off the bat, then you’re playing the wrong game. CoD became the wrong game for me. I stress “me”, because I know many of you still love it. - Pandering to the Console crowd
Most AAA games pander to consoles. That’s where the money is in North America and it’s unsurprising. Unfortunately, the PC platform simply gets shut out in the accounting. As a PC-gaming advocate, I don’t think PC gamers should play second-fiddle to anyone and for that reason, we should only be prioritizing games that, in-turn, prioritize PC gaming. - Devs to listen to players
Some AAA game devs don’t listen to their user base, even though they insist they are. In many cases, that insistence is significantly overstated. Let me give you an example. Whether, it was well-intentioned or a cynical marketing tactic, CoD devs ask for inputs from their community leaders around the late-May time frame and then open things up for public suggestions a month or so afterward. Why bother? The flood of fan input can not produce any significant changes to the game, given that the product is typically in Alpha, or early-Beta by that stage. This leads you to conclude that the requests for input are more of a marketing campaign, than a serious effort to change the game to suit player wishes. In fact, given the size of the fanbase within any AAA title, the chances of true dev-player dialog is near zero. Contrast this experience with B+ or indie titles. I was shocked, for example, when Homefront added some features I had been looking for and emailed their devs. This was eye-opening. If the not-quite-AAA Homefront could be directly influenced by its community, imagine what we could do with indie, or F2P titles!
Good ol’Days
By dialing away from AAA, big-budget, hi-tech, mass-marketed, console-oriented titles, I felt I needed to recapture the original spirit that existed when FPS games first became popular. Back then, hardware (and to a lesser extent, coding) held everyone back and the games were rough around the edges and spartan. These days, F2P games are just as sketchy; however, it’s the coding that is holding most back — not hardware. Coding is something that can improve far more rapidly than advances in hardware and thus I am very optimistic that F2P game quality will improve rapidly.
The F2P arena was something that especially appealed to me. F2P is an egalitarian idea. It allows almost everyone in the PC community take part. While the big-ticket games like MW3, BF3 all require significant digital-horsepower to run, most F2P games can be powered by lowest-common-denominator machinery. That opens up the community to hordes and hordes of players, rich and not-so rich, around the world. The potential of finding a “world-game”, played by the well-off and those who can only afford a table at an internet-cafe’ could make F2P a formidable console-opponent.
I made the decision to move away from games like CoD and move a bit towards F2P not because I wanted to piss off fans of this site, nor because I wanted to spite the oligarchical game companies that make today’s AAA-titles. I decided to move towards F2P games, because they are what I’m playing.
The scene in F2P is as rough, raw and energetic as the free games themselves; however, F2P could very well be the future of PC gaming. The reason? Forrester Research suggests there will be 2 Billion computer users by 2015. 2 Billion. That’s an-installed base that will be hard to overlook and given the state of today’s hardware, those PC’s are just sitting there waiting for the right code to frag with. Some, like AVA, are fun right now and come with large user-bases and an enthusiastic social-gaming scene with very competitive gaming.
BS’s Minimalist Period
While I don’t think we will be staying away from AAA indefinitely, I like where my head-space is currently at. Call this BASHandSlash.com’s minimalist period.
