Great Expectations

 Bad dog.

Positivity is one of the most powerful forces in the world, I am told. With the power of believing in yourself and sheer confidence someone can drag themselves through the worst of the worst and empower the passions and dedication of those around them, and I believe in that power. But it can be a fragile tower, building upon expectation and positive reinforcement, when it all crumbles into nothing; just as it can be a lighting rod of elation when the opposite happens. The same is true from the level of an individual as it is from the heights of a conglomerate video game development studio, and we can see perfect examples of both extreme outcomes within the space of just the last year thanks to attitudes towards two franchises that received reactions almost polar to their initial general thoughts. (I know they both surprised me.) So let us take a gander at this phenom together, shall we?

Saints Row. What can a man say about Saints Row that hasn't already been said to death? It was the discerning man's crime game, rife with intelligent introspection into the societal foils that engender criminal enterprises and the spiralling manner of modern living that points the unfortunate and uneven down to that way of life. Actually, Saints Row is nothing like that- the entire franchise is more just 'A bit of banter', at the end of the day. Early day Saints Row was considered a rather limp GTA clone, then a zany product of it's own, then a slightly overly zany friend still dancing at the party as everyone is winding down, and then an annoying drunk still stinking the place up and thrusting at everyone obnoxiously the morning after. The Saints Row Reboot was supposed to be a return to the heyday of the franchise... well, not it's origin, but more a sweet-spot just after the origin and just before the downwards trajectory. And I remember there being some actual excitement upon hearing this.

Those who knew Saints Row all had their ideas about when the franchise was at it's best, and all were being catered to throughout the marketing process with carefully, or perhaps not-so carefully, chosen platitudes. It wasn't until the first trailer that real dissent started to air. I didn't get the complaining at the time and found the only coherent complaints to be crass and/or contrived, but whether through random luck or subliminal sabotage: that shift in attitude would mark the trajectory of the reboot forever more. When it finally did launch, the most charitable thing anyone could say was that it would have been a perfectly standard open world title 10 years prior. Otherwise it was outdated, badly written, buggy, uninspired, oddly ashamed of itself and largely impact derived. Saints Row Reboot was quite frankly a critical dud. But what about commercially?

Well get this; reports have come out claiming that the Saints Reboot might have cost somewhere in the ballpark of 100 million to create; which is either evidence of simply incredible mismanagement or mask-off cartel money laundering, because that ambition does not translate to the final product. In fact, considering the recycled animations, the underpaid writing team, the 'meh' graphical improvements and the overall vast feeling of emptiness... I think that maybe people should be watching very closely what Volition put out next else we might be having a bit of a Borderlands 2/ Alien Colonial Marines situation on our hands. That would be the only way I can justify this sort of insane price tag. Oh, and would it surprise you to hear that the game fell short of expectations in it's sales? Somehow the publishers over at Supervillian-group-in-training Embracer were surprised they never made a profit; which makes me seriously reconsider my understanding of the universe because I though that was the most predictable outcome since the sun rising every morning. (Maybe if you lie to yourself that reception was 'mixed' long enough it starts to truly alter your perception of reality.)

And on the total other end of that spectrum comes a game that I had absolutely no faith in, and that a lot of people wrote off in it's early reveals, that came around to smash general expectations into nothing. Sonic Frontiers had all the makings of another 3d Sonic dud, especially given that it was coming right off the heels of the embarrassingly undercooked Sonic Forces and was trying something the franchise had never tried before, semi open-world! I thought the game was going to offer nothing but a substandard experience piece with low-effort exploratory open world mechanics and a largely forgettable overall package, and it seems that whilst I wasn't totally wrong I wasn't totally right either. The game is largely well received and managed to sell absolute gang busters from a Sonic fandom utterly shocked they've got a real functioning Sonic game to spend their money on.

In fact, I'm not the only one who lost their expectation bet when it came to Sonic Frontiers. Recently we've seen SEGA themselves, confident as they were during the marketing stage, come out to confess that the game overperformed what they were expecting, which means either they really didn't believe in their own developers or Sonic managed to truly break it's own glass ceiling in it's ascent back to some form of general relevancy. All of which is great news for the Sonic franchise, of course, which is scoring recognition points just about everywhere recently. Movies, TV shows, new comic franchise; Sonic is getting around. Maybe we can start to see an actual new take on the Sonic formula so that these games can get on the path to being something special again. (I've got the perfect pitch for a reimagined Sonic, just call me, SEGA!)

Expectation is quite the magical ingredient, is it not? Our means of preparing ourselves for the coming inevitable, either for the brace of disappointment or the elation of success. Whereas I'd imagine that Saints Row is currently in the process of burning their future plans given the thorough rejection of just about everything their latest game stood for at a fundamental level, I'd imagine the various Sonic creative teams must be running out of ideas to slap down and make more fans off of. A world of opportunity is opening up at one end of the industry just as a dozen doors are slamming shut over at the opposite end. Do you ever wonder, why to win somebody's got to lose? It's like the great universal balance requires a sacrifice before it'll award it's bounty elsewhere.

Hype is the double-edged sword, there's no doubt about that. But it's also just that tantalising fruit we can't manage to totally keep away from. Resign yourself to never get all goo-goo eyes over some upcoming new game or movie and suddenly you're the dull thud of the party. I expect something of a more critical eye when it comes to the recommendations and expectations within a coherent business analyses of their own potential success or failure, but I suppose maybe the world of speculation and prediction is so called for it's transitory nature, is it not? At the end of the day I can't help but wonder, why exactly qualifies these people to be speculator's when industry fans like us tend to have a better hit rate than them? Confidence, I guess.