Video Games in 2015: A Year in Review

This has been a banner year for disappointment in video games. When the games aren't devoid of interesting story or gameplay, they're riddled with debilitating bugs, graphical glitches, multi-gigabyte day one patches, all seemingly made worse when games are ported to PC.

Console-itis used to mean at worst wretched UI and horrible controls, now you're lucky if all it means is dreadful FPS and rampant crashes to desktop. If you're unlucky, it might mean the game is pulled from PC completely leaving you wondering "Why on earth did I spend $3000 on this gaming PC?"

It's hard to say exactly when things started going so badly for video game consumers. Certainly, bugs and day one patches are nothing new. We find ourselves, however, at the center of a whirling dervish of mediocrity. A perfect storm, if you will, of several conspiring factors.

Everything Counts in Large Amounts

Microtransactions and ridiculous DLC are worth mentioning first in this cavalcade of broken dreams. When we aren't losing huge swaths of gameplay to the reaper's scythe of Season Passes, we're inundated with "micro"transaction schemes that would put the most devious of Ferengi to shame.

It's easy to point to games like Star Wars Battlefront and complain about lack of content, but what about Double Fine's Broken Age controversy? What about Double Fine's Spacebase DF-9 controversy? Oh hey, have you heard that Tim Schaefer wants to crowdfund more things? -__-

DLC and downsized crowdfunding are really just the other side of the microtransaction plug nickel. Developers and publishers are quick to defend schemes like Halo 5's REQ Packs by stating emphatically that everything can be earned "whether you spend money or not."

Oh, great! How did that work out?

...Oh.

And don't get me started on MGS V. Konami doubled down on the already frustrating FOB system by increasing the amount of resources that could be stolen by other players through online FOB raiding missions. But after the game had been out a few weeks, Konami released an update that added FOB insurance. As they describe it, "Your FOBs are always at risk of coming under attack. Now, you can rest easy with FOB insurance (paid service). If you sign up for insurance, then during the insurance period you will be compensated for any materials and staff lost due to rival infiltrations."

Oh, and then they increased the amount of resources that would be vulnerable to online FOB missions. That was when I stopped playing. The ostensibly multiplayer features were now directly impacting my experience in single-player. I said don't get me started.

Technical Difficulties

Idiotic cash grabs notwithstanding, this generation of gaming has been a huge disappointment, technically speaking. We can look back on the Xbox 360/PS3 era with some fondness as we remember features that we used to take for granted turned into quivering shells of their former selves on Xbox One/PS4.

Gone are the halcyon days of functional and user-friendly party and group chat features, built-in media players (without downloading an app), and fast, snappy UI menus that give you quick and simple access to the features you want to use most like friends' lists.

The PS4 has somewhat improved in terms of UI, especially when it comes to sharing screenshots or video, but the social aspects are still severely lacking in usability.

Then there's the Xbox One. The NXOE is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Supposedly, the goal of this whole ordeal was to speed up the response time of the UI, improve usability and user experience, and lay the groundwork for Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (i.e. running Windows 10 apps on the Xbone).

What it actually did is take an already slow platform and make it downright retarded. They actually ended up making things harder to find and there is just as much delay in loading features as there was on the old dashboard.

And then there's the Wii U but who cares.

Lipstick on a Pig

It's one thing to release remakes and HD remasters, but to add insult to injury, for the most part these have been pretty terrible. Halo Master Chief Collection and Gears of War Ultimate Edition stand out as being especially egregious, with Halo MCC being horribly broken for several months after release, and Gears of War somehow looking worse, and performing worse than the original did on Xbox 360. :slowclap: Great job on those, idiots.

Sony's platform has no shortage of horrible remakes coming down the pipe. Everyone begged and pleaded Square Enix to release a Final Fantasy VII remake, and what did you expect? That Square Enix would somehow spare FF7 from the horrible linear snoozefests that have dogged the series since it's PS2 days? To paraphrase Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of St. Neots, you're an idiot if you thought that.

2015 was an awful year for video games, there's no way around it. Whether you were disappointed by Star Wars Battlefront, Halo 5, or Fallout 4, may your 2016 be a happy joyful one spent playing outside in subzero temperatures freezing your balls off because that will be preferable to playing whatever hot garbage the game industry poops out of its distended collective anus this year.