The good thing about having to work pretty much all the time these days is having the money to pay all the bills, buy food, live. The downside is that there's so much to do, I just don't get the time to update this blog as much as I would like to. Another downside is, well... more work = more responsibility.
I like having a todo-list of sorts when it comes to my monthly work orders. On monday I gotta hand in this review, on tuesday I gotta preview that, write a guide on wednesday, post some news on saturday and so forth. But once you work for more than one publisher, it gets difficult to organize these things. And when one or several titles turn out to be downright unplayable and you need to postpone a deadline, organizing stuff becomes downright impossible.
There's also the fact that, once you write about stuff with a potentially larger fan-base and more powerful publisher than your average Korean grinder, you'll attract much more attention. And not just the good kind.
I wrote a little preview on the reboot of Final Fantasy XIV a while back. Nothing big, just a little two-pager. The game costs a monthly fee and I dared say, at the end of my preview, that I wouldn't want to pay that to play the game, as it doesn't really do anything new or groundbreaking that you can't get in plenty of Free2Play games.
Blasphemy, I know. I'm not saying the game is bad. It's a traditional MMO, which doesn't attempt to revolutionize the genre, it does exactly what it says on the package and it does a good job at it. FF-setting aside, it offers more or less the same stuff I can get on WoW. Or, if I don't like monthly fees, Rift, Everquest 2, you get the idea.
Stupid new game hype. Everyone is losing their shit about this game right now like it's the next big thing. Give it another month or two until the masses realize they're still just killing boars and farming endgame tokens (I lied, there is no endgame) in a fancy environment and the sheep will move on to Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar, once again fully believing in the "next big thing" only to feel utter disappointment within a month.
But the damage had been done, there was a 30-something page hate-thread about me and my preview on the official forums and people came up with fascinating conspiracy theories about how I hate Final Fantasy and infiltrated various gaming magazines to harm the entire franchise. Funny. I remember playing the first MMO of the series in Japanese, because I couldn't wait for the NA or EU version. It didn't just end with random nerd rage, though. Square themselves felt the need to tell me how dissatisfied they were with how I felt about their game. Which is interesting, considering I had told them exactly that in an email, weeks before I wrote that preview. To which they replied I was never supposed to write any more reviews or previews about the game. Interesting stuff. I'm not entirely sure what gives them the authority to tell me whether or not I'm allowed to review their shit, based on my personal opinion about their games.
This whole situation is new to me. I'm used to 14 year olds, whose "life-long experience with games" consists of a dozen PS3 games and clicking through a few pages on Wikipedia, telling me how much I suck at my job, that I don't have a clue what I'm writing about, they want me to get fired, blah, blah. When I was that age, I used to idolize most critics and I would have killed to have a job like that, but I guess the power of the internet can turn all of us into assholes. Zero fear of consequences and all that. But over 30 forum pages about how much I suck and an angry game publisher throwing a fit because of my preview was something else. The psycho shit their product manager had tried to pull on me for revenge could fill a whole new blog post. Stupid, manipulative asshole!
I finished my review on the game last night. And I stand by my original statement. The game does what any traditional MMO does, without adding anything new or groundbreaking, but it's worth looking into if you're not expecting the "next big thing" and you don't mind the monthly fees. Nothing more, nothing less. There will be some die-hard fans, who will demand my head on a pike, others will complain about the score being too high, the usual kinda crap. You can't please anyone on the internet and I can live with that.
What pisses me off is how much I've been fretting over the whole damn article. How petrified I was to even start writing the fucking thing. All because of some publisher telling me I "wasn't even allowed to write about their product", putting me on a guilt trip, trying to manipulate me into giving out a better final review score or staying away from a review altogether.
You can tell yourself not to care. That you won't be affected by such bullshit, just do your thing and give your honest opinion. But can you really? It's tempting to lash out when somebody tells you, "Dude, we didn't even allow you to review our game!" Then you get the usual crap like, "All the other reviewers had a much more positive opinion about our product than you did!"
I can't deal with all this nonsense. Not really. When I write about a game, it's my opinion, my personal thoughts and experience with the product. Don't give me shit about being "objective", there is no such thing as an "objective review". You can try to be fair, but in the end, personal opinion affects everything. And I can't stand having somebody trying to manipulate me into thinking I'm being too harsh or having somebody act like a total dickhole, making me want to be harsh. I can't work like this!
I think I'm done talking to publishers. Next time somebody has a problem with one of my articles, they can talk to my employers, sort it out with them. Gaming used to be about fun. All this mass market multi million dollar bullshit is turning games into a joke and the whole fucking industry with it.
-Cat
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