Online Gaming: The Biasness of Game Developers - Gotmadskillzson's Blog

Gotmadskillzson's Blog

Online Gaming: The Biasness of Game Developers

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 08:59 PM.

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We all know or should all know that online gaming is the money maker for businesses. This is the sign of the times. If your business doesn't have an online presence somewhere, you will struggle and be swimming against the current.

But at what price should we, the consumer have to pay in order to achieve this goal ?

It has gotten to the point now, most developers are short changing the single player experience to the point that story mode only last 10 hours of game play for action/adventure games and 20 hours for role playing games.

Honestly this is saddening. I was able to beat the last 3 call of duty games the same day I bought it. Homefront only lasted 3 hours. Hell even Dragon Age 2, a RPG only lasted 22 hours. That in itself is absurd.

Now lets move on to sports games. This is where the crap really hit the fan. In the past 2 years now, sports games are starting to become buggier and buggier when you play the CPU.

It makes me wonder what is the mindset of developers nowadays. Do they think 99% of their customers going to play online ONLY and never play against the cpu, so therefore we not going to worry about a bugged out cpu AI ?

Sometimes I honestly think that. Because to me, it is no way in the world if you played against the CPU in a sports game, just one game, you couldn't see majority of the flaws in the CPU AI game play logic.

Every year, I read about some developer saying they nerfered this and nerfed that because it was being abused online. The downside to that is when you play against the cpu, that thing you nerfed is now non existent.

Take scrambling QBs in NCAA 12. Last year and pretty much for the past 6 years, online players abused scrambling QBs by always running with them. So what did they do for NCAA 12 ? Gave all QBs a carry rating in the 50s and injury rating in the 70s. So now not only do they fumble a lot, they also get injured a lot too.

Then when the cpu QB scrambles, they only run up the middle, very rarely do they run outside of the offensive tackles. But not only that, but they run like Peyton Manning, all stiff and lifeless. Plus they slide way too much as well. Can be just 1 defender coming towards them and they will slide.

Another example of them catering to the online crowd, is RB special moves. They completely nerfed, killed RB special moves this year. Juking is no where near as effective as it use to be, neither is stiff arm or lowering your shoulder. About the only one that still is effective is spin moves.

But once again, lets move on to how it effects the CPU, since not everybody plays online all the time. When you play against the cpu, they very rarely use their special moves at all. 1 on 1 situations, instead of trying to spin, juke or stiff arm to get around that ONE DEFENDER, they just concede defeat and run into the defender without even offering up a fight.

Last year in Madden online people were talking about the high number of interceptions online. Now this year in Madden 12, defensive backs drop interceptions that hit them in both hands.

All this online biasness is really hurting the single player experience. Developers need to realize when they nerf something for online play, they basically kill it for offline play.