Then things started to go wrong. Other trailers started coming out. Jar-Jar was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. The kid George Lucas picked above all other children who auditioned had dubious acting talent. You saw these things happening, but you didn't want to admit that it was going to fail. You believed.
I worked for Microprose Software at the time, and the company gave everyone tickets to go see The Phantom Menace at the closest theater to the studio in Hunt Valley, MD. I guess they figured the entire staff was going to be there anyway, might as well make a gesture to appear magnanimous.
It was horrible. So horrible I felt the good bits of my childhood slipping away as I watched. The magic was gone. The Force was no longer with me. I've since caught bits of the other two movies, but I cannot bring myself to consciously sit down and watch them. Mostly because I have an appreciation for good acting and Hayden Christensen is uncomfortable to watch in general, much less as Anakin Skywalker. But also because there's no point in trying to get back what I lost forever.
Fast forward to 2013. Two games on the horizon whose predecessors I was in awe of. The first was Egosoft's "X: Rebirth."
Here's the trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Bb_jCP1mJo
My God. Just look at it in its glory. And all they had to do was simply update the graphics from X:3, come up with some stupid storyline that I'm only going to ignore anyway, and maybe tweak the UI a little and poof! they'd have recreated their magic.
They chose not to do this.
Instead, they decided to "improve" and "reinvent" the series. They decided to restrict the game mechanics--allowing you only one ship to 'exist' in. (the previous iterations allowed you to have any ship) They reduced the size of the play-universe, obscured the trade functions, and scattered the UI into a hundred unintuituve pieces. In short, they consciously decided to scrap most of the facets of the game that set it apart from its far inferior competitors. Three years I waited for this gorgeous... flop.
That was fine, I thought, I have "Thief" on the horizon. There are few game series that I think on as fondly. I still play the old ones from the 90's even though the graphics are horribly dated. Once again, screenshots aplenty. The rich tapestry of "The City" in all of it's glorious squalor...
This time it was a yet different developer, as Looking Glass Studios made the original two, then Ion Storm made the third, but keeping to Looking Glass's canon. Eidos Montreal took the baton and promised to keep the game's integrity intact. And it seemed promising. They rejected third-person perspective, favoring first-person, as all the other versions had. Although they were including options that, to me, made the game a bit more like "Dishonored" than "Thief," they made sure these were options that could be disabled at the outset of a new game or within the settings menus.
I preordered.
Then I read this article reviewing the game. I cancelled my order only hours before the launch, figuring I can borrow it from a friend first to see if it's worth the $50 price tag.
I've since done so, and I did buy the game thinking that modders could correct all the problems with it. The level design is atrocious, the voice acting is uninspired and stilted, and the storyline is unengaging. All of these things I expect from a lesser game. All of these things are fixable once a title leaves the developer's hands. All of these things make this a game I'll eventually get around to finishing some day, maybe. But once again, the magic is gone.
Eidos Montreal has since laid off at least twenty of the people that worked on the Thief. This doesn't look good for official DLC or patches, not that I want them...
My gaming soul has been killed.
But look how pretty the new Dragon Age screenshots are! I really liked the first one...
...I refuse to get my hopes up.
