The latest triple-A game to launch and faceplant, HARD, has been, of course, Gears of War: E-Day. The independent media has been full of news about just how bad things have gotten for that game – and, weirdly enough, this is one game where the backlash is, at first glance, very strange.
Apparently, this is a game that took at least six years, and a MINIMUM of US$300 MILLION to develop. I have seen estimates of 7 years and $400M, but whatever it was, there is no doubt that Microslop, Xbox, and The Coalition, or whatever the hell the studio that made this thing is called, invested an UNBELIEVABLE amount of resources and effort into developing this thing.
Given all of that effort, and given how good the game looked in its early trailers, you would expect it to have been an immediate smash hit.
It wasn’t:
The analysis of these numbers indicates the wheels truly have come off the franchise.
There is simply no disguising the magnitude of this failure, especially given the stakes involved. This is a game released nearly 7 years after Gears of War 5, which I have played a couple of times now, and although I started off a year ago saying it was great, I have long since moderated my view significantly. Gears 5 had great gameplay but a SHITE story, and the characters were completely meh. The only time the campaign genuinely was fun, was when the classic characters, like Marcus, Baird, Cole, and even Paduk, were on screen. The rest of the time, it really was quite lame.
So this new game NEEDED to blow people’s minds. It needed to be a colossal jump-start for the franchise, revitalising player interest and establishing GoW firmly back in its place as one of the absolute greatest game series of all time. It HAD to succeed.
It didn’t.
Precisely why it didn’t, does not take much effort to figure out:
If you cannot be bothered to wade through all those game analysis and review videos, that’s fine. Just watch this:
Yes, it’s a satirical anime take from before the game dropped, but it is accurate. The game went all-in on woke.
I am not kidding about that. Although you play through the game as Marcus Fenix, the actual leader of the squad is a Black half-blind lesbian with rustlung called Mags.
No, I did not make any of that up. I wish I had. But it’s true:
Yep. The Coalition literally did the meme. They literally made a crippled Black lesbian the effective protagonist. But, being SJWs, they did it in a way that is subversive and sneaky – not direct.
They broke the lore by pretending that a Black engineer-bro came up with the chainsaw bayonet for the Lancer – not Adam Fenix, on Marcus Fenix’s suggestion. They broke it even further by pretending that this ugly girlboss character figured out how to close up emergence holes by tossing frag grenades into them – when the lore makes it absolutely clear that it was Marcus and Dom who figured that out.
Now, there is nothing new about video games retconning or outright disposing of huge segments of lore in a franchise. HALO: Reach, which longtime Halo nerds love, and with very good reason, absolutely TRASHED the existing lore in the books, and nobody holds that against Bungie. The reason why, of course, is because Reach told an incredible story – one of courage, brotherhood, and ultimate sacrifice to achieve a long-term strategic victory.
Bungie did the impossible with that game. They turned humanity’s greatest defeat in the Human-Covenant War, into something that genuinely felt like an achievement, a win. For that reason alone, we forgave them all the ruination of the lore that Bungie committed.
It helped, of course, that the same people who established the original lore, more or less, were the ones who made that game, but that is a secondary point. Indeed, Bungie were appallingly bad about being consistent with their own lore, even within the context of the games themselves.
So we could all forgive The Coalition a failure or two in making sure that they followed the lore and canon properly. What we cannot forgive, is this interminable girlboss nonsense that has absolutely no believability whatsoever.
Are we really supposed to believe that a half-blind woman with a breathing problem is going to be able to keep up with fully fit and extremely strong men, especially given that, to my knowledge, COG armour is not powered? Are we truly supposed to think that the women of the COG are the same size, more or less, as the dudes in armour? This goes far beyond the acceptable bounds of lore-breaking, and right into “the only way you can believe this is if you have a double-lobotomy” territory.
The result of all this nonsense is that gamers are abandoning The Coalition’s latest game in droves. And this is despite the fact that the game has actually a pretty decent rating on Metacritic. Users give it an 87% on Xbox, though PC gamers give it a 70%.
This happened despite the fact that the new game brings back the horror elements of the franchise, the dark and moody lighting, and the blood, guts, and gore that have always defined this series are amped all the way up to 11. Yet they couldn’t leave well enough alone and just keep Marcus Fenix as the centre of the story.
Which brings us to the broader problem with modern triple-A gaming:
The people who make these games have utterly forgotten what good storytelling is.
If you look at HALO: Campaign DEvolved, the big problem with that game is not the graphics – which are amazing. It is not the gameplay – although I personally really hate the way they have changed quite a few elements and made the entire game much more of a slog than the original. It is the storytelling, especially in the new prequel missions. The people who created those missions, have ZERO UNDERSTANDING of what grounded, realistic, gripping storytelling really is. They have no ability to create compelling and interesting characters. All they can do, is project themselves into the world of the game, with zero respect for established lore or background.
And when you look at the people behind modern game studios, this is not surprising.
Take a look at the photo up top. That is part of The Coalition’s team during Sin Month, 4 years ago. As you may have noticed, the oestrogen and gayness levels are OFF THE CHARTS. These people are not interested in making good games – they are only interested in making games that conform to their agenda.
And they are being rightly punished for it.
To repeat, by all accounts, Gears of War: E-Gay is actually a damned good game to play. And yet, I have absolutely no desire to try it out, because I am not interested in having my expectations subverted.
On top of that, the business dynamics at play (so to speak) with these games, at least on Xbox, are terrible. A big part of the reason why this game flopped so hard, is because it went live on Xbox Game Pass from day one – and that, from a revenue perspective, is a dreadful idea. Game Pass is a subscription service that distributes revenue based on how much people play a game, which by default means that it cannot generate anywhere near as much money as standalone sales from individual copies purchased.
The result is that this game was almost certain to lose money from the start. And the people at Microslop had to know this beforehand – it is not like they did not have data from previous Game Pass day-one launches, from the unmourned Phil Spencer era, when the Xbox division really started to crater.
So they released this game, knowing it would fail, and they deliberately rammed a bunch of DIE nonsense into it, just to piss off the fanbase. It was, in my view, a wanton act of willing destruction. I just don’t think they expected it to flop this hard.
There are several lessons to draw from this debacle, and others like it in recent days – including the aforementioned HALO rebuild, and Marvel’s Wolverine, which also flopped disastrously, not least because the studio made Jean Grey the actual main character, not Logan.
First: there is no point whatsoever in paying full price for modern games anymore. I am honestly DONE. I was excited for the new GoW game, but when I realised The Coalition had turned it into Queers of War, I was absolutely done. I WILL NOT pay full list price for this game.
Instead, my advice to everyone is to get an Xbox Game Pass subscription for one month, play as much of this game as you can stomach, and then cancel it immediately thereafter. This way, you can enjoy the blood and gore for a while – and from what I can see, the cover mechanics, action, boss fights, and just general combat are REALLY GOOD – while still forcing Microslop to eat a massive loss.
There are ways to stick it to Microslop that go beyond this, though. If you have an Xbox SeX (so to speak), then you have the ability to use physical media with it. So, if you are in the US and have a Gamestop store nearby, go there, pick up a secondhand copy of any Xbox game, pop it in the DVD slot, and then open up the Xbox options menu for that game. Xbox will then allow you to download a digital license for that game – which in many cases will give you access to all the extra DLC, for free.
Get yourself a secondhand Xbox SeX, so that you never have to subscribe to Game Pass, you can get whichever classic games you want, and you can enjoy playing them to your heart’s content.
Second: there is no real way to fix this current situation, short of burning it all down. This is where the (relatively) new head of Xbox comes in. Asha Sharma has, by many accounts, done a sterling job of righting the ship after the disastrous Spencer era. She does seem to have a much better connection to the fanbase than any other previous Xbox exec, because she actually bothers to interact with the players:
She might listen to the players, which means we might one day actually get decent to great FPS games. The next HALO mainline title might actually be decent, for all we know. And the utter failure of Queers of War: E-Gay, might well convince her to burn down The Coalition and fire everyone.
Lord knows, they bloody deserve it. And I write that as someone who has been through multiple layoffs personally. I don’t normally wish layoffs on anyone. But if you hate your customers and treat them like absolute shit, and then betray their trust, well, you deserve to lose your job.
For all that, however, Asha is still a Pajeet, and a female one at that. I trust her about as far as I can throw her, because Pajeet, and I have no confidence whatsoever that she is on the side of gamers. She is a Microslop insider, reporting up to another Pajeet, and that means she will not hesitate to resort to typically scummy Microslop tactics of sticking it to gamers and consumers if that is what it takes to make P&L targets.
Third, and most fundamentally, perhaps, we all need to understand that triple-A gaming studios are essentially dead. There is nothing left to salvage in any of them. Most are run and staffed by women and troons. They have nothing to offer men in terms of mass market appeal. This is not because male gamers are incorrigibly sexist; ask any JRPG or KRPG gamer what he likes about those games, and you will get a laundry list of things that work really well with games like Stellar Blade, where the women look like WOMEN and are actually fun to play.
Heck, does anyone remember Bayonetta from back in the day? Or Samus from Metroid? Those were great female protagonists that were genuinely good fun to play in the RPGs.
We must now put our faith in independent gaming studios that will not have the budget or means to produce the eye-popping visuals that triple-A studios should be creating – but those games will actually be fun, because the creators will focus on the things that actually matter: story, world-building, character, gameplay.
(There is of course always Saber Interactive’s Russian division, which was responsible for creating Space Marine 2. I would dearly like to see what that outfit could do with a HALO game, honestly. Leave it to Russians to create something awesome that is rooted in tradition and masculinity. They GET THAT SHIT.)
Moreover, we no longer really need to care about what the big platform owners think. With the advent of Steam on PC, Linux, and handheld consoles, we do not have to be tied down to Sony’s or Microslop’s ecosystems any longer. And with Sony PS5 emulators getting ever better every month now, we will likely soon get to the point where PlayStation gamers will be able to severely punish Sony’s idiotic decision to go to purely digital media.
For those who do not know, Sony recently announced that they would no longer allow gamers to buy physical discs, and would instead require everyone to buy digital downloads that sit in a library that Sony controls. This means that you do not actually OWN the game which YOU BOUGHT with your own money. And that, by definition, puts the truth in the old adage that “if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing”. Sony effed around, and are soon going to find out, HARD.
We all need to do everything we can to avoid giving Microslop and Sony any more of our money for full-price shitty products. Buy secondhand and deny both the revenues. Use Game Pass if you must, but stick the knife in and twist it with new games.
Go for older games instead on physical media – I was so disgusted with what The Coalition have done with E-Gay that I pulled out my old copy of GoW: Ultimate Edition, the old remaster (not the rebuilt version, GoW Reloaded, that’s a different game entirely), and started playing that again today on my Xbox SeX, and it is HELLA FUN. With Microslop Cloud Gaming, you do not really need to install the game physically anymore, as long as you are willing to give up some of the eye-candy.
I note parenthetically that all of these points are things we used to write about on the old Reaxxion site back in the day, when Roosh had the time and ability to coordinate various men to write for that website. It has been defunct for over a decade now, but time has taught us that the things we railed about back then, have simply gotten much worse.
The upshot of that is that the consequences to big triple-A gaming studios for Effing Around, are a level of Finding Out that we could only dream about back then. In those days, we almost never saw massive layoffs on the scale of what happened to Halo Studios, and what is likely to happen at The Coalition. The studio heads and writers absolutely deserve to get shitcanned for what they have done. The developers, far less so, but that is the reality of working on a game that the fans actively hate.
If there is anything good coming out of these disasters, it is that the market eventually self-corrects. We vote with our wallets, and people like me are voting, HARD, to make sure that stupid politically correct slop like this simply gets chucked in the gutter, where it belongs.
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