DMC and Dead Space 3

This is sort of in a similar vein to my last article, about the way that "fans" of the Devil May Cry franchise wanted DMC to fail solely because it changed things. Dead Space 3 can be added to that as well seemingly. Though honestly in the case of Dead Space 3 it makes even less sense than with DMC, I mean honestly, there have been zero changes to the Dead Space formula outside of the addition of crafting and rare fights with human enemies. But it all stems from one group of idiots, maybe on an early trailer, or even as premature as a post-announcement interview. Someone hears something that they interpret to be "HURRR WE'RE SHITTING ALL OVER THE IP LOOOOLLLLLOLOLOLOL!!!1111ONEONEONE!!!" when it was really more along the lines of "well we feel like it's getting stagnant, and we need to bring this franchise into the modern day, but we need to do that without sacrificing what first made it so beloved."

And then of course that small group of fools spreads their absurdity to those around them, such that their friends, and their friends friends, and the people who read their internet comments, have their opinions colored by this small but vocal group of invalids. And it really feeds into the idea that, if you go into something expecting to not like it, and wanting to not like it, you aren't going to fucking like it. So these sequels and reboots are essentially crippled before they ever even get out the door and it's ridiculous. We, as gamers, are systematically destroying everything that makes games good. WE are the ones forcing developers to make games for the one purpose of mass appeal. Because they know if they make something that appeals to a specific crowd, the slightest change to the formula will bury them in a financial pit so deep Bill Gates couldn't dig them out.

Enter Call of Duty. Call of Duty has had a consistent fan-base of mostly casual gamers and people who really only care about the multiplayer aspect of games. But those of us who aren't fans of those games, often hate them for the fact that they never change, they literally release the same game year after year to a horde of ravenous college kids so excited for the next game they don't even realize they might as well have not taken out the previous disc. Now let me remind you that this is exactly what you're all raging about when DMC and Dead Space DON'T DO IT. They change, they evolve, they grow up as games. So just to clarify, CoD never changes "OH COD IS SUCH BULLSHIT THAT'S THE SAME GAME EVERY YEAR", Dead Space changes "DUDE WHAT THE FUCK, I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS ISN'T THE EXACT SAME GAME AS LAST TIME, THIS IS BULLSHIT". Starting to see the problem?

And, even if change wasn't absolutely critical from a creative stand-point, it is critical from a financial one. Much as we like to sit around bitching and moaning about how EA and Activision are such a bunch of commercial whores, THEY FUCKING HAVE TO BE. Games are expensive as all hell to make. I mean seriously it's borderline stupid. We're talking 30 million, minimum, for a big budget title. MINIMUM. So when you sit there, tears streaming through the babbling brook that was once your quad-chin, the wind of your sobbing whistling through the reeds of your neckbeard, shouting incoherently about the evils of micro-transations, consider the facts. And consider this, if you love a series, and you want the series to continue, you need to be ok with changes, you need to be ok with a wider appeal. And you need to be ok with the fact that it's a business, and money will always come first. Or you need to be ok with the exact same drivel being released every year on a by-the-numbers formula, and if that's the case then shit, join the CoD crowd, they have jackets I think (or those might be adult diapers, correct me if I'm wrong).

And don't get me wrong here. I'd love it if this all wasn't the case. But the fact of the matter is we don't live in a fantasy world. Look at THQ, they rarely did what companies like EA or Activision do, they made games based on what they believed the game should be, and in doing so, dug their own grave.

And this isn't even touching on the issues surrounding DMC. DMC wasn't trying for a forced appeal to a larger audience (which Dead Space 3 really wasn't either). It was simply given to a new developer, a developer with a really great opening effort under their belt. And they did something incredible with it. They kept the heart and soul of DMC in tact, and they updated it. They brought it out of the place it had been sitting for the past 10 years and made it cool again. You could even see in DMC4, that they wanted a change. Nero was an experiment. Capcom's way of testing the water. You look at his combat mechanics, more fluid, more dynamic, cooler looking on screen, and then when they throw you back into control of Dante you find yourself missing the grab attacks and abilities of Nero. Dante just isn't as much fun to play. DMC brought the fun back. And the "fans" collectively killed it.

Both DMC: Devil May Cry, and Dead Space 3 are likely the epitaph of these two phenomenal franchises. Each has performed well below expectations thus far. And while numbers for Dead Space 3 are currently unreliable, the numbers for DMC are not. It has sold terribly. Well below one million copies thus far across all 3 platforms combined. Considering a baseline budget of well over 30 million, coupled with a monumental amount of spending put into advertising, and it doesn't paint such a pretty picture. And that is in no way the fault of the developers. These guys put their souls into these games for years so we can enjoy them for 10-20 hours, this is THEIR creative vision. But thanks to the idiots of the world, it is no longer a possibility for people to present a true creative effort without it being stepped on and crushed into the dirt. So thank you, all of you, for ruining some of the last bastions of good games we had left. I hope you enjoy the future you've wrought, because it involves about 30 dozen different variations on a first person view of an M4.