The Unfinished Menace

 You don't know the power of corporate deadlines!

What if you found yourself trekking through the deep Appalachian wilderness at 11pm at night in search of a tiny wooden cabin like one does on a free weekend. What if you found that edifice, mottled and windbeaten, doors wide open and cracked on their hinges like a broken gaping maw. What if your horror movie reasoning led you into this cabin off the edge of society, and crouched beside the lampshade in the living room, you find a heaving, seething mass in the corner, all bones and taut skin, gurgling something intelligible and bestial. Your heart catches, but the thing hears you anyway. It stretches it's long white neck and slowly turns around to reveal- the face of a stick figure. Two lines for the eyes and one half moon curve for the mouth. Turns out the monster didn't have time to be finished before it was set loose on society. It would kind of kill the mood a bit, wouldn't it? You would have a hard time taking it seriously as a threat, and if you can't even do that then perhaps the entire purpose of this horrific visage has been ruined, has it not? Well, can you see where I'm going with this?

A fashionable trend has emerged in the recent years, one that some of the truly fashion-forward were already lightyears ahead of (Bethesda, you daring trendsetters) but which has now finally caught on with your average QVC watcher; unfinished releases, in all their piece-meal glory. Because why sit down and actually finish the product and clean to an acceptable state to the audience, when you cut a corner in order to squeeze into the end of yearly financial report. Sure you're going to hurt your reputation, your ultimate sales numbers, probably your future sales numbers, the pedigree of talent you're likely to snag in the future, and just the general respect of the entire industry; but, you know, gotta make those black numbers in the ledger look big! That's a... worthy exchange? None of this is new. I'm not blowing your mind with this take and it's something that has been bubbling away for a while, this trend towards the unfinished. But something about these past 2-3 years has been- just egregious. It's getting much worse, and I want to talk about it.

I think a big one that we tend to forget about for some reason is Anthem. (Never forget, ya'll) A game which, honestly, it feels like no one wanted to actually make. Here Bioware spent several years and too much money sitting on their hands trying to figure out what they even wanted to make whilst EA got more and more upset until they forced out a launch. Now Bioware were no slackers here, they immediately jumped on the Todd Howard defence ("It's not about how your game launches-" etc.) but people soon found the game was almost empty at it's core when you peeled away the faux excitement from the developers, honestly there was little driving potential behind it. This is perhaps the gold standard of the Unfinished Menace, because at no point did Bioware manage to convince the world that they had a plan beyond "Get it out and hope everything works out" and how did that end up for them? Well the game's development just got effectively abandoned for a year before EA officially killed off hopes for a do-over. That's right, Bioware literally sat down and asked if they could just make the game again and start from scratch. I ain't no fan of EA, but I genuinely sympathise with the utter gall they had to endure through this game's entire life cycle. Let this be an example of the worst case unfinished scenario.

And then we have Cyberpunk, at perhaps the other end of the spectrum. I don't like to talk about Cyberpunk much these days because of how badly it hurt me, but seeing them be listed under the potentials for best RPG of the year in Geoff Keighley's game awards just severely triggered me. Best action game and I'd have been fine, but best RPG? What a joke. This is a game that was sold on the premise of 'it'll come out when it's ready', which held true until overconfidence took over and the team at CDPR backed themselves into a corner that they didn't have the resources, staff numbers or time to get out of. What people got was a game utterly unrecognisable to what was promised aside from in visuals, and even then those visuals were what the highest of the high-end consumer could achieve exclusively. The role playing was lacking, the character choice faded away after the prologue, the depth of the city was non-existent, the game just wasn't done; but the game wasn't a total mess either. (at least, not when it was playable.) This has allowed CDPR to quietly pivot the goalposts and pretend that this considerably more vapid 'FPS with extra flairs' style Far Cry game was the goal all along, however seeing as they're up for RPG of the year it seems that the deception did fool some of us, eh Geoff? Consider this the "misdirect ending" for the unfinished game narrative. 

Grand Theft Auto The Definitive version, or whatever the stupid name of this thing was, is the most recent example. (tied with the rest upcoming on this list) A game made by GTA porters who have a history of questionable choices, much of what The Definitive Edition got wrong could be attributed to either laziness or not enough time. (I suspect a little of column A and a lot of column B) Overall the problems sum up like this: AI upscaling, porting inferior mobile version back into PC and consoles and questionable artistic choices. Rockstar have already started tackling a lot of the issues and the latest stupidly big patch shows us that Rockstar-proper doesn't mess around when it comes to their reputation. But it still shows as a rush to finish the polish of a game that they already sold for full price, which isn't the best possible look, now is it? Definitely still ongoing, but I've actually developed a bit of faith that Rockstar might actually make up the difference for Grove Street Games' botched unfinished mess. (An unfinished remaster/remake- how has the industry sunken that low?)

Another big one has been Battlefield 2042, the game to break a thousand fan's hearts. After months of effortless hype built from straight lies, including an interview where they bold-faced claimed that this game was taking the best elements from 3 and 4 and adding new things ontop of that! (Funny, I seem to remember both those games having SCOREBOARDS) The game is a mess, contentless, empty, poorly designed, lacking destruction, you've all heard the spiel. The most sensible reasoning behind this has also been the saddest, people think this game was built to be a battle royale and had to have those systems gutted at the last second for whatever reason. Basically meaning that the mess of a game we now have is due to emergency smashing together of an unfinished product with insides that weren't designed to go with it. A victim of chasing the trends gone horribly, though predictably, wrong.

And finally we have Battlefield's more excitable twin brother, COD Vanguard. A game which is being received much better than it typically would just because the competition is a total dumpster fire this year, although it's still selling the worse than the series has in about 14 years, so you win some you lose a lot. The missing content here comes from the disaster of a mode that has been married with COD games for nearly years now, the Zombie mode, which seems to have been getting worse and worse over the years. Even with that general warning that we weren't exactly heading towards a grand Zombies renaissance, the pathetic lack of grand Easter eggs, strongly themed maps, exotic random weapons or really substantial gimmicks of any kind, was certainly unexpected. Yet another full price game coming this year with a severally wanting package.

These are the games that have flooded the market over the past few years, normalising the belief that products don't need to finished before they're rushed out of the door to an audience, and every consumer out there should find that concerning. Heck, I have no problem with companies like Larian taking the slow approach and releasing their stuff in early access so that they narrow in everything perfectly and learn how to improve the gameplay with the audience, because that's upfront and cooperative, but selling a complete experience as a pipe dream and then spending the next few months trying to patch the leaky ship whilst grumbling about how poorly all your hard work has been received; that's crazy to me. At this rate, the label of 'AAA' should be ripped from the industry entirely, as it no longer indicates a game with polish behind it but just a higher budget potential trainwreck. (In that case; god help the new 'AAAA' Perfect Dark game.)