Are we moving too fast?

I've been playing some Bloodborne in the past month, and as with most games I play, it's prompted me to my keyboard to write an opinion piece about it. Here at GameGrin, we never managed to get our hands on it upon release and now, half a year later, it seems too overdue to put together a review for it. And this got me thinking.

Bloodborne is singlehandedly the most anticipated console exclusive in this generation, and the short-lived debates about its stature as both entertainment and art hint at a careless practice by both players and journalists. I'm probably not the only one that has a seemingly interminable list of games awaiting playing, many of which will never be etched onto my hard drive. This leads to situations like these, where the game I'm sinking hours into is no longer pertinent to the gaming discourse. At least, the one dominating websites and magazines. Think about it; when was the last time you heard any news or opinions on Bloodborne?

We're talking about a genre-defining game here; its storyline, its narrative tools and the art style, yes, but also its mechanics, fluidity and coalescence of all elements. And I find myself on the wrong track, thinking that my experience with the game is something people want to discuss. This game is in no way as deeply explored as it should have been. Admittedly, there was plenty of chatter in the subsequent months to its release, but neglecting it from then onwards is a disservice to the game and players like me, particularly for such a paramount title. However, people dismissed it as they turned to the next flashy game.

On the other side of the coin, we happen to encounter an endless stream of speculative previews about the upcoming Rise of the Tomb Raider or Assassin's Creed. Games rarely have presence after the first couple of months following their release, but rather the long two years coming before them. How many trailers and gameplays of The Division have you watched up to this point? How many did we watch about Bloodborne itself before it came out? Too many. We knew that we were going to buy this game before we even read a review, and it’s because, as we all know, hype's a great ally of sales.

In my opinion, this is not how things should work. Yes, films too have had a similar consumerist approach to their own medium, and they have profited plenty. Nevertheless, a more realistic and consumer-friendly one to game journalism would be to shorten the pre-release period where the game is given extensive coverage, and thus increasing the one post-release. Simply because the consumer base can rarely keep up with the volume of titles coming out monthly. In all likelihood, due to time and money constraints, you'll manage to play just a few of them, and even fewer if they're AAA. Moreover, if you're anything like me, you'll never buy a game on release, and go back to games you missed years after they had their moment of fame.

Fortunately, there is a noticeable number of sites that focus on in-depth explorations of games now left out of the mainstream media, mainly retro games, too outdated to still have a say in the current panorama. Some other games endure the harshness of time by virtue of their quality and perennial design, such as Half-Life 2, which features in this month's issue of some prominent gaming magazine in the shape of an exhaustive analysis of its narrative figures. Additionally, we often find that MMO developers have to perpetuate the presence of the game in the media by constantly adding new content, or drastically altering the way the game's played so far, like in the cases of Destiny or Guild Wars. For the rest of the games, we can only fill so many holes with the unreliability of user-created content.

It turns out that there is audience for games long after their release. You could write tomes about a game like Bloodborne post-release, and they don't have to be speculative and hype-inducing like game previews have traditionally been. However, the way this wheel spins forces both journalists and players to look two years ahead, and forget everything that's older than a few months. Now, the only mentions of Bloodborne are a few words comparing it to Dark Souls 3. I'd personally encourage everyone to ignore the distant future and focus on all the games that have come out in the past few years that you missed. Actually, this reminds me that I never got to play Demon's Souls. Well, now’s a good time as any. Or it should. I guess I should prepare for all the new upcoming games that will be presented at EGX this week.

Edit: a day after this was written, news about expansion content for Bloodborne came out, which furthers the argument that developers, and not players or journalists, are pumping life into otherwise neglected games.