The World, according to Jaffe

If you’ve been under a rock the past few days, and haven’t been checking out all the usual gaming blogs, there has been some high drama and nose thumbing surrounding the upcoming downloadable ps3 “Calling All Cars,” spearheaded by David Jaffe of God of War fame. You see, Jaffe has been going for this highly accessible rock-star of game-producers persona, and so he’s been keeping a blog and sharing his feelings with the world. 

His first post was a response to the reviews of his game.   Specifically, he scored an 8.5 from ign, an 8 from 1up.com and a 6.7 from Gamespot. That last one really pissed him off. So he blogged about it and apparently changed the game based on some of these early reviews. He also waxed poetic (schizophrenic) about the appropriate way to review games in the first place. 

He did raise an interesting question though: should a game be reviewed on whether it achieved the goals the designers set out for it, or should it be set against all other games. I responded with my opinion on his blog that the problem with only reviewing games based on the designers’ intent, isn’t enough, because sometimes, the premise sucks. 

Last night Joystiq ran with a story that the game had been pulled. They lead with the analogy that Jaffe was “Like a little girl struggling to keep her favorite doll out of the garage sale bin.” The story implied that he’d personally pulled the game to address any negative issues in the reviews (and no doubt to have the game re-reviewed over and over again until it scores perfect 10s). This turned out to be wrong, and Jaffe replied in his blog, respectfully suggesting:

TO THE LAME ASS WEBSITE THAT SHALL GO UNNAMED- Fuck you, guys. Go fuck yourselves. What other developer makes a fucking change to a game when a review (IGN’s in this case) has a good, valid point and is willing to open the fucking code up at the risk of more bugs to make the game better? Amazing.But hey, you guys are great, you guys rock. I hope Kotaku fucking puts your ass out of business, wanna be fucktards. And if you were actual journalists you would have read the motherfucking quote I posted on NEOGAF where I said because of the two bugs we needed to fix (not because I was afraid of the bargin bin) we had a window of opp. to fix the magnet problem. Assholes…total fucking assholes.

Granted, the joystiq story, and the angle they pitched the story at was wrong. If Jaffe is to be given some credibility, he says the game is done save for two bugs in the network code (nothing to do with the reviews), and that it was Sony’s call, not his. 

Putting all the nonsense aside, the issue this really raises is whether our whole system for releasing games is screwed, and whether developers should pull games to respond to reviews. We already live in a world where games are delayed for incomprehensibly long periods of time. Part of it, is the pressure on the industry for developers to start showing and talking about their products early. After last year’s E3, Too Human director Denis Dyack took some flack for his clearly half-baked showing, and fought back with an attack on the marketing pressures of videogames (see the article here). 

Is this industry broken? I don’t think it is, and while I absolutely applaud designers going back to the drawing board when bugs and gameplay issues surface, I want games that are done to be burnt onto disc. Particularly on consoles, part of the appeal is that you stick the disc in and you’re ready to go. Having to patch your game on a console (while great that you can), taxes the resources of the consumer, and takes away from the appeal of the console in the first place. This is, of course, less of an issue with downloadable games, but if marketing pressures, and release schedules are forcing games to be released and shown before they’re ready, then it needs to stop. Jaffe has definitely shown a human side to the industry, all be it a childish one, and that’s cool, but his real value has been in highlighting some of the issues screwing up our ability to get games released, and for that he gets a half-assed handclap.