The 2007 Review - a Year of PC Gaming
YouGamers' Biggest Disappointment of 2007As is always the case, when it came to choose the biggest disappointment from 2007, we were spoilt for choice. Most people went for different picks though: Daniel voted for Sony's Lair on the PS3, whilst Claudio ultimately went with Clive Barker's Jericho. Other big titles to have desk-junk thrown at them were Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed ("it's pretty, but the game itself is poor. Has the look of a project where the game was added on to the graphics at a very late stage. - Jani) and EA's Hellgate: London ("an unfinished mess" - Aaron, who also thought that Assassin's Creed was "entirely mundane"). And it was STALKER that left Pasi cold: "I didn't expect all that much, but I did end up buying it with real money and never played beyond the second level." Other folk were more general, such Jarno's choice of every new MMO this year.
"The whole field of massively multiplayer online game developers seems to have crawled under the bed. Once World of Warcraft raised the bar, everyone else seems to be giving up on even trying to compete. So we got a full year of half-baked contenders failing the first "check" of any MMO - is this better than World of Warcraft? No? Not even in some small way? No? Oh well... LOTRO got closest to the mark, but considering how much it missed the bar, MMOs these days feel like pole vaulting, with everyone except Blizzard jumping without the pole. Entertaining to watch, but not a competition. Only other MMO game worth mentioning these days is EVE Online, and their trick is to do their jumping with a jet pack. EVE is so different from anything else that any small technical shortcomings won't matter that much - direct comparisons to WoW-like games don't really apply."
However, the deciding votes went with mine, Joe's and Antti's choice: Games for Windows LIVE. The whole thing is based on a really unstable foundation in the first place: paying for an online multiplayer community system, when there is already a multitude of tools and websites doing the same thing, for no fee whatsoever. Okay, there is indeed a free version of GfW Live but that's where the good stuff ends. For example, Microsoft state that with it one can "Play against other PC gamers online with Halo 2 for Windows Vista." WOW! PLAY AGAINST OTHER PEOPLE!!!! ONLINE?!?!? Holy crap, that's like... decades old. Seriously Microsoft - it really isn't a new and unique feature!
But then they make it worse by launching the service with the capable but bland Shadowrun and an average port of the two years old Halo 2. Gamers had to wait until the end of the year for a decent GfW Live game, Gears of War, but they even managed to mess that one up too, by having the save system linked to a necessary Live account - refuse to make an account, and no save games are created. Microsoft just don't seem to understand that whilst the system is pretty useful for the Xbox 360, it's nigh on pointless for the PC; gamers on that platform have been playing against each other online, in all kinds of games, with no problems and no need for something like Live. To rub their face it, Valve launched their own Steam Community this year, which does similar things, but better and for free.
Biggest Disappointment of 2007: Microsoft's Games for Windows - Live
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