This game was revealed three years ago and we have not heard a single peep about it since. Now, all of the sudden, Playstation has released a new trailer and made the announcement that they are about to dazzle us with absolute garbage. Seriously, nothing about this trailer looks even remotely good enough to play for free. It doesn't matter if they sell this with gold coins, it's not going to make its money back and the aura around it is absolutely stale. For some reason, it's not even called Fair Game$ anymore. The names "Break In" and "Project Espresso" seem to be roaming around the zeitgeist of this... game now.
What makes this signifigant is two fold: Hideo Kojima just got cancelled by Sony and the big fat lie they told is still dangling like egg on their face. Not only that, but the next big thing is Concord, High Guard, Marathon, the promised Horizon Gutters Sadder. They start putting all of this out in their advertising for a game where people rob banks. All of them are people of color and all of them find it morally correct to rob banks because you are stealing from millionaires. Okay, well it was clear from the first reveal of Fair Game Dollar Sign that there was no interest in this game. It was victim to a very hard spanking from gamers around the internet.
Well, the new game trailer looks... better? Now, they are all racially ambiguous because their heads are completely covered. Instead of the initial nonlethal weapons they used in the first reveal, it looks like they just took off the mittens and went full submachine guns. Okay, wonderful. It looks better. That just means it will look better when it fails. I'm sorry, but I have no hope for any of this, especially if you need to pay for it. There is no released space buck amount for this game, but whatever it is, it had better at least be free. You're still having to rival Pay Day, which is already a very popular series, especially the second one, which is still going pretty strong.
Then there is the problem of the entire graveyard of games that have already failed in the market very, very recently. Seriously, more and more Live Service games with no single player options that require internet connection, it's been done. Extraction shooters are a single mode in some games, ones with far better gameplay. Even with worse graphics in older games, this has all been done and done to death. This is all just too bland to make a dent anywhere. Where is the hook? Concord had the exact same problem, people saw it for what it was and they noticed how bland everything looked. The playtesting for Project Decaff was a disaster, with people cited very boring gameplay and ended up quitting in the middle of matches after only a few minutes.
On top of all of this, the CEO developer for this game up and quit! Either they quit or they were fired, it's very unclear, but that is also a very hard scar across the face of this already very flawed looking game. Why should we trust Playstation in the first place? They're already in water so hot it's turning into a lobster fest, it's very unlikely that this game would even make a dollar more than its development and marketing cost. If that happened, we here at Planet Virtua would be utterly shocked. They've decided to retool Horizon Zero Players after an absolutely atrocious playtest. Whether that will keep its Live Service status is yet to be seen, but if they are sticking with that cartoony character style with Butch the legless wonder, their future also looks especially bleek.
Every single one of these games can be replaced several hundred times over. There are far better games that scratch the itch that these games claim to scratch and they can and will be cast to the wayside. When game publishers clearly don't care what games they make, they just crunch the numbers while crunching their developers to make games that have been put through the slop mill. Their labors go unappreciated, their direction was always obscured in the wrong direction and gamers go ignored while the lunch lady gives them more sprouts and tofu when all they want is a school pizza or burger. Gamers were once served steaks, burgers, fine cuisine and fine soups for appetizers. Now, we're lucky if we can get salsberry steak from a TV dinner. We once had Tim Curry and Peter Stormare in a Command and Conquer game, there is no way we could perceive just how good we had it. Now, women turned Wolverine into a soft boy, Spider-man gets sidelined in his own game and the gaming industry is trying to take away our rights to own games. The crash continues, friends. All we can do is move on to the next campfire. Keep hope alive, friends and keep drinking water.
