Earlier this month I wrote a brief piece discussing fanboys, I decided to include that piece in the latest edition of The PC Centric Extravaganza over on 411. The responses that is has generated have been very interesting to read.

The first comment that really caught my attention was this one by Snake211;

Oh no PC fanboys? you should check out NMA. To them Fallout 3 is an abomination, only Fallout 1 and 2 matters.

Posted By: Snake211 (Guest) on July 08, 2008 at 12:50 AM

I couldn’t believe that I had ignored No Mutants Allowed a site dedicated to all things Fallout. The people at NMA have strong feelings regarding the Fallout universe, they can be seen to view anything which breaks away from the original two Fallout games with considerable unease.

It is the unwillingness of the NMA community to accept that their beloved franchise is changing direction that is most striking. Things such as the move into 3D, a first-person perspective and such like have caused much grief amongst NMA members.

A more recent example of fanboy’ism is this online petition by a group of Diablo fans calling for Blizzard to change the art direction of Diablo III.

I have also witnessed a great amount of fanboyism when I was deeply involved in the Command and Conquer community. The most striking thing about the fanboyism in the C&C community was the sheer number of strands of fanboyism that are present. You have the hard-core competitive gamers who love the construction style of the Generals games but fear going back to the classic Construction Yards of the Tiberian and Red Alert games while fans of the latter two games are dead-set against any moves by EA back to the Generals method.

Now I come back to the comments in The PC Centric Extravaganza from last week. A debate errupted about Bungie, Halo and games ripping off each other. This now is less of a fanboy rant, more of a general mass of words from me concering gamers.

First of all I don’t have a clue how Bungie and Halo entered into the comments section, but we shall leave that for now. There were claims that Bungie ripped off Valve, that Halo stole everything it had from other FPS games, that Bungie aren’t even great developers, that all console FPS games steal from PC games and that Bungie have no honour.

Those were the feelings that were emerging from a variety of people last week, and I would like to just talk about them. I’ll first set my stance on how I view Halo, Bungie and console FPS games and console games in general.

I do not hate Halo, I do not hate Bungie, nor do I hate console FPS games or console games in general. I played Halo when it eventually came onto the PC, what has irked me most about the Halo franchise is the role Mircosoft have played in keeping it on the Xbox or 360 for so long at the expense of us PC gamers, and giving us shoddy ports that use Games for Windows Live (Halo 2 anyone?) Halo was, if I recall correctly a game that was originally planned to be a PC game, unfortunately it became a console game first and foremost and a PC game as a second thought.

However I do not see how Halo or Bungie stole/copied/ripped off (etc.) anything from Valve. The Half-Life and the Halo games are fundamentally different, they cannot be compared and any claims that Halo is a rip-off of Half-Life are totally unfounded. If you want to see a game that copies and steals from other games then just check out these Rock, Paper, Shotgun articles.

At the end of the day most FPS’ are similar to each other, I have played numerous demos of mediocre games that all felt the same, at the end of the day it is only the great ones that stand above from the crap. Half-Life, Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, Call of Duty all spring immediately to mind as standing above everything else. While these games may have similarities to each other or even other games, well so what? As long as they aren’t actively stealing from games (like Limbo of the Lost see link above) then people shouldn’t go claiming that they are.

Console FPS games can be good too in their own right, but due to the inherant differences between how people play a console game and a PC game then they cannot really be compared. FPS’ that appear both on the PC and on consoles have to be different from each other in some ways to make up for the differences in controls and input methods. A PC gamer can do things that a console gamer can’t do as easily, the opposite can be seen with racing games..

Closing thought then?

Can’t we all just get along?

One last thing, the word fanboy has entered the dictionary.

Tags: 411, Fanboys, Feature

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Features, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.