2013 Game Releases

ARMA II is probably one of the clunkiest FPS games I've ever played. The controls are terrible.

Ya but on scale and authenticity it is second to none. Arcade shooters have become tired and rehashed to the point of nausea. When I was a kid and games were getting bigger and better it was awesome, especially the transition to 3D. Then around 2005ish it really seems like ingenuitive development stopped, and most new games are recycled shit. The downside is that most people eat it up and the game budgets and profits have become unprecedented. In the last 5-10 years the only real change to MOST games have been graphics. After playing Arma and to a lesser degree Battlefield, I don't think I will be going back to corner shooters or simplified limited choice games in general.

The industry is headed into the direction of simplifying games to make them more accessible in order to increase their demographic. While that worked for the bottom dollar, I think they could have made games on a grand scale while also allowing simplifying options to allow accessibility alongside complexity and large scale. That or just release simplified games alongside larger ones. That really isn't the case and an unforeseen consequence has been that a lot of respectable developers have been bought out by behemoth producers [cough EA, cough] that have made obscene profits by capitalizing the larger demographics. They've turned respectable titles into watered down versions of their former selves, saturating the gaming market with a ubiquitous conglomeration of shit.

SimCity 5 is a good example and is why it should probably be struck from that list. What kind of a sequel is it when they downsize the scale of the game and take away tons of options. The only thing that is better is the simulation engine, but of course it's gonna be better when the size ambition is reduced to nothing. That and the DLC plague where they take away features on a sequel then launch them as DLC. They did that with Civ as well. Took away several of the playable factions and then just released them as DLC fluff later down the line.

/endunexpectedrant