The New Narrative CIG Should Be Afraid of posted:
Despite a big fuss being made over Activision not having a booth at E3 2016, the savvier among us recognized that this didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be present at all. Activision was around, of course, and they were set up in their own set of meeting rooms with demo reels for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Skylanders: Imaginators, both of which I dropped by to check out.
A publisher with the kind of financial muscle and industry influence that Activision can bring to bear doesn’t play around with its biggest franchises, and we saw that in full force here. Activision may not have had a regular booth at E3, but they were certainly there, in force.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare turned out to be one of the biggest surprises for me at E3 2016. Yes, I know, it’s Call of Duty; how could that be surprising at all? It turns out that with Infinite Warfare, Activision might actually be taking the series in a new and fascinating direction, something like a more action-based Mass Effect.
The demo opened with your standard Call of Duty run-and-gunning. It’s the sci-fi flavor of Call of Duty run-and-gunning this time around, as we’ve seen in the past few games since Advanced Warfare. Before long, though, gruff military hero Captain Reyes calls in his ship, the Jackal, and takes off into space for some Star Wars-style dogfighting. The action flows smoothly in and out of the ship, with Reyes embarking and disembarking as the situation demands; we watch as he infiltrates an enemy ship by landing nearby, blasting open the bridge windows and swooping in, for instance.
Later in the trailer, we find that Reyes commands his own larger ship. Much like Mass Effect, this comes with a starmap that can be used to determine your next location.
Yes, insofar as I could tell based on a non-playable vertical slice, it looks like this is going to be a Call of Duty with open-world elements where you can decide for yourself where to go and what missions to take on next. That just might be what it takes to give this franchise a new level of depth…but is the Call of Duty name going to scare off gamers who are looking for that kind of depth?
Either way, you can guarantee that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is going to sell like gangbusters when it drops on November 4th. What’s more, as a space-themed game it’s intruding on a space – pun intended – that’s gradually becoming more and more crowded thanks to the return of the Star Wars film franchise and the runaway success of Star Citizen’s neverending crowdfunding campaign. Comparisons are already being made between Infinite Warfare and Star Citizen’s single-player facet known as Squadron 42, where the latter is a story all its own – it was originally intended to be at E3 before Cloud Imperium Games pulled out at the last second, raising all kinds of uncomfortable questions about where the endless stream of crowdfunded money is going. We might end up seeing a battle between the Big Evil Publishers ™ and the Small Scrappy Indies ™, and what’s going to happen if the evil publishers deliver a better product?
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THE GOOD NEWS & THE BAD NEWS
The good news for CIG is that this very sharp write-up appeared on a low-traffic site of no particular influence.
The bad news is that the narrative posited in the closing paragraph is so now incredibly obvious and irresistible that it will surely have occurred to more than just rogue outlier bloggers and our present gathering of Star Citizen analysts, satirists and prognostications.
There is no narrative more explosive and dangerous, more fraught with the potential to lead to an overnight reversal of fortune than this. Unfortunately for Chris, the Gaming Press, for all their storied timidity, has an especially cozy relationship with the AAA Publisher & Gaming Development Complex. They are, generally speaking, supplicants of industry, their existence largely derived from the largesse of AAA advertising budgets.
There need be no direct order, broadcast by shadowy cabals in smoke-filled rooms, to destroy anything or anyone. It is the notion itself, so ironic and unexpected yet so
right-sounding, that has the power to completely dismantle the central organizing principle of Star Citizen itself. If this same conclusion is declared by a major outlet like the increasingly prickly Polygon, it will spread like wildfire through the tributary gaming outlets and REMAIN. And it isn't really a question of "if" but "when" -- because the promotional drumbeat for Infinite Warfare is beating, beating, beating and it will not stop, it will only grow faster and louder in the months leading up to their November launch.
The burden has never been so great for Chris Roberts to prove the
distinct competitive merits of this unprecedented experiment in consumer-funded, publisher-free, creator-centric game development. Yet so far as we can see, he's never been less prepared to do that.
