ATTN: 3D REALMS
After twelve years - twelve goddamn years, guys, seriously - you need to pull out something bloody spectacular for a trailer, even a minute-long teaser. That is not what this is. I didn't think it was possible without some intense CBT but I think I actually care less about this game than I did last time I thought about it, sometime in 2005. Twelve years! Twelve years. Britney Spears' entire career has peaked and foundered while you've been working on this game. Valve have significantly altered the topography of the FPS field twice over in the time it's taken you to put out an extraordinarily underwhelming teaser trailer. What are you playing at, lads. What are you doing.
It was a mistake to release the teaser, I think, but they said all over the place that it was just a dumb little thing 2 guys stayed up late putting together for their company Christmas party. Then they thought... hell, they did the work, let's put it on the internet. So they did. It was a bad way to break a long media blackout, but still, I fail to see why this shit has everyone so up in arms.
As for Valve, I think another 7 years in the cooker might have made HL2's design less horrendously gimmicky and reliant upon repeating the same dog tricks over and over again until they gave you a new hoop to jump through, and then maybe they'd also have an actual story with actual characters instead of a bunch of worthless cardboard props that all want to give you a blowjob throughout the interesting yet utterly plot-less series of events they wrote for us. And yet we still don't know much of substance about
DNF, and the games aren't aiming to do anything similar from what I can tell, beyond both being FPS games.
So maybe we should worry less about altered topographies (and the utter failure of Valve's attempts at episodic gaming, for if you want an example of something that made me lose complete interest in a franchise, you need look no further) and just agree that
DNF could be a halfway decent game at the end of the day, even if the road it took to get there was pockmarked with several very bad decisions which led to huge setbacks. It's not like anybody owes us anything. They're making a product, and I fail to see why anyone should take it personally just because it's taken so long for them to get their act together. Seriously, what's it to you? Yeah, it's bad process in development. That's a lot of wasted time and money. But everyone has a chip on their shoulder about this one, and frankly, I'm beginning to find it really irritating.
EDIT - Also, forgive me if this post is a little bitey. I'm just extra annoyed with other angst on my own boards, and some of that spilled over here.
