We’re going to be starting a new weekly feature here at Wii60.com to further identify us as a website and a community called WiiRanty.  The idea is a member of the community or two (or three!) will have a rant of their’s posted on the front page every Monday concerning a topic in the games industry.  It can be from anywhere to someone’s frustration at the direction a franchise is going, or how much they cannot stand franchises that have annual titles, or what Microsoft and/or Nintendo have actually done wrong this gaming generation, the problem with gaming expos, or whatever.  It’s a weekly views piece, as well as a soap box for our editors and our community.  Heck, you can even write a rant about what the gaming industry is doing right for a change and just try and get people to acknowledge that.
There’s a bit of a catch, though: firstly, while I’m sure plenty of folks want to get up and rant about Sony or Sony Fanboys or what have you, those sorts of topics will not be accepted unless there is a really good reason for it.  We are united, after all, because we believe in quality in gaming, not because we like to insult Sony.  Also, any views piece will be looked over and editted before being posted, but if you send in a rant that is full of typo’s and lacking in punctuation, you will be rejected.  We are not going to rewrite your rant so it will be presentable.  It is up to you to write a coherent piece.

With that said, any ideas you have can be submitted in either this thread or you can send them to ccesarano_at_wii60_dot_com.  Do not post your rant on the forums, though, if the concept has been accepted.  Once your idea has been accepted, send the rant either in HTML form or Microsoft Word format to the email listed.

And now, with the feature introduced, here is the first rant to kick it all off written by yours truly.  I hope you all enjoy it.

No More Secrets
by Chris (Grohdinger)

A big theme in the movie Sneakers, a film focusing on a group of hackers, was “no more secrets”. In the game industry, secrets tend to be a huge thing. Companies want to leak enough information and gameplay that you’ll be able to look forward to, but there’s a lot they want to keep hidden so players discover them as surprises. Or maybe they wish to keep them secret so competitors don’t get hold of the designs, data or code and rip them off. In other cases they just wish to reveal special features at special events.

Before Halo 2 launched, the French version of the game had gotten leaked almost a month before the title launched. In the first level alone several surprises and secrets were revealed. I know because I had been unable to resist the temptation not to play a friend’s hack and give Halo 2’s Legendary mode a spin. However, I still saw roommates playing through and watching cut scenes with English subtitles. So many surprises were ruined, and by time the game was officially released a lot of the experience was destroyed. I knew what was going to happen, and I even knew some of the situations in the new levels, making the game a bit easier my first full play through.

Now the Halo 3 Beta has been released, and constantly there are new bits of code and information being posted on our forums from other news sites that hackers discover. No more secrets.

This irritates me to no end because there are multiple backlashes for this. The first is that I can’t trust anyone mentioning Halo 3 news as being official because it could simply be another glimpse at the hacked code. The second is that a lot of data is going to be in the code that may not actually be in the final game. People released a full list of weaponry as according to the source code, but how much of that data, for the time being, is still being tested? How much of that may be taken out of the final game? How much may simply remain as the Hot Coffee scene had remained in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, unintended to be used or played? Now people are going to be expecting it, and when it’s not in the game they’re going to complain and Bungie and Microsoft are going to have to suffer for it.

Finally, I cannot stand the fact that people have no sense of surprise anymore. Sure, I want details on the game as well, but at the same time I don’t want everything to be laid out for me before I even get my hands on it. Do you want to know all of the details of a movie before it is released? How about I tell you all the events of the second season of Heroes before it even airs on television? Sure, there’s a difference between plot spoilers and listing out all of the weapons, but it’s a difference in the experience. In Halo 2, when I first picked up the Sentinel Beam, I laughed and got excited because I had no idea it would be useable. Just the experience of picking it up and running amok with it was an amazing experience.

My point is that, while I’m excited to find out all about Halo 3 as well, I also want that feeling of surprise when I first pop the disc into my Xbox 360 and play it for the first time. I want to be surprised at what I’ll find, even if it’s something as simple as being able to further customize the MJOLNIR armor.

In this industry, when you have no more secrets, you lose half of the fun of anticipation and that first play through. Why would you willingly wish to ruin that?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Wii60.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.