Risk aversion

Am I flogging a dead horse? It almost seems cliche, only a week on, to chastise the decision to turn Syndicate into a "cinematic First-Person Shooter" – and here's the kicker – "true to the spirit of the original."

That's functionally and empirically untrue. Syndicate was part of its own oversaturated genre, the Real-Time Strategy genre, and while Syndicate perhaps focused on areas that the "harvest resources and sit in your over-fortified base until the other team destroys themselves" type of RTS didn't, it still stuck its claim to the mantra of "big guns, cool shades, chilly atmosphere" in an effort to transfer those RTS principles to a cyberpunk blow-em-up.

It was largely successful, if not exactly mindblowing. I guess if that's "the spirit" that they're retaining with this reboot, then they've got it (though, so too does the new Deus Ex, to likely far greater acclaim). But the idea that any older genre needs to be "updated" as an FPS for wide market appreciation is both sad and ludicrous to me.

Let's maybe look at XCOM for further proof, as the game series that it's based upon, unlike Syndicate, was a bonafide classic. XCOM was tactical, turn-based strategy at its finest, and the ideas that its game design document favoured (mainly, brainy strategizing) is by the very nature of the FPS going to be nowhere to be found in the reboot. It's fine to try new genres (and even FPSs, done right, can be a good genre change. Look to Metroid Prime for proof of that), but these decisions aren't being made for any artistically valid reasons – it's being done, as always, for marketability and profitability.

The problem, first, is that this is untrue to the legacy of these games. Gaming in general is far more beholden to franchise and sequelitis, but a sequel in gaming isn't necessarily cause to dismiss a game's artistic validity out of hand – look to Zelda, for instance. But XCOM was never meant to be an FPS (or a space-flight sim if you want to go even further back). It simply doesn't fit with the chilly, tactical atmosphere of the series. People who grew up with these games or people who enjoy the genre are left in the cold simply because the FPS is the go-to genre for mouthbreathing cretins. And the fans of games like XCOM, or heck, even Syndicate, deserve better than that.

But this isn't about the loyal fans. EA was never going to be interested in updating the conventions of Syndicate in an interesting and modern way. The proven easiest way to make quick money is to make any given game an FPS. Simple as that. The game gets more coverage than a new IP would because of name-recognition, the outrage of players who grew up on these games keeps them in the public's consciousness, the gaming sites who cover the games in previews have seemingly no problem with the FPS-ization of the game series (because they, too, seem to love FPSs beyond all reason), and the players who end up buying the game – curious fans of the series from the past coupled with the legion of people who buy any game because it's an FPS with a multiplayer component – get a mediocre game taken from a mediocre genre that hasn't challenged them in probably over a decade.

Look, I'm no fan of FPSs (as should be abundantly clear from this site), but I can recognize that a game like Half-Life is pretty brilliant. These games aren't going to be another Half-Life. XCOM, from all indications, appears to be a vaguely Bioshock-esque game mixed with the Pavlovian instincts of any popular military shooter. This isn't good or interesting game design, it's just what people know, and selling people what they know (especially in a genre as en vogue as the FPS) is the easiest, least risky thing that a company can do.

This is a problem that runs rampant in Hollywood as well, and it's absolutely the wrong approach to game design and film production. Hollywood has proven that the entropic risk aversion that has so decimated the ability to get anything that isn't an already-proven property (even if that property is something as asinine as Monopoly, for christssake) produced is creating a culture of not just artistically inert films, but also one where profits are drastically falling. No one wants to spend money on a new idea because new ideas can't be focus tested to within the nearest decimal place of projected profits. The exact goddamn thing is happening with video games, and it absolutely shouldn't be this way. Video games are the perfect space to try out new things, things that aren't particularly mainstream, and have them be successful and even change the cultural conversation. Heck, that sort of thing happened nearly every other week in the days of the NES and SNES. Where have we gone so wrong?

No one wants to blow their massive budget wad on a dud, and so gamers, again, get treated like imbeciles. "Here! You'll buy this thing because you love this thing already! It's an established property in an established genre and who gives a fuck if you've been playing this exact game for the last ten years now?" Well, I give a fuck, and I won't go down without a fight. Bad game design and brazen capitalism make for terrible bedfellows, after all.