First of all, sorry for not having this up yesterday and while I'm at it, sorry for not having something up last Friday. Now, on with the show.
The Last of Us came out a short while ago (Well, almost a month ago) and from what I've heard about, it would be a game that I would love. Something about a post-apocalyptic world (and the title suggests something akin to The Road) which if done correctly, will get me pretty much every time. Once I started hearing good things about The Last of Us is when I tried looking the game up on Steam. That's when I found out it was a PS3 exclusive. That's also when I became annoyed.
The Last of Us came out a short while ago (Well, almost a month ago) and from what I've heard about, it would be a game that I would love. Something about a post-apocalyptic world (and the title suggests something akin to The Road) which if done correctly, will get me pretty much every time. Once I started hearing good things about The Last of Us is when I tried looking the game up on Steam. That's when I found out it was a PS3 exclusive. That's also when I became annoyed.
Console exclusivity has been a thing since the beginning of video gaming so the concept/practice is anything but new. Personally I find it to be annoying, especially if there exists a game I would like to play, like The Last of Us, but I do not own a PS3 and the two people I know who do own them probably wouldn't be too keen on having me sit in their living room for the 14-20 hours it would take to complete the game. Which then makes me wonder how often people buy a gaming console because a particular game is not released on any other system. I understand the draw/appeal when a console is launching, but for exclusivity this late in a console's life, I can't see as a selling point.
Admittedly however, I did buy a PSP because Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions was coming out and I bought a PS2 from Doc Torpotts after he won one from a Coke bottle cap back in 2005 because I wanted to play the upcoming Final Fantasy XII.. All the other systems I've bought (Nintend0) were because I liked the company and liked the games that were being released, exclusive or not. And, while it's true that I do have a number of exclusive games (Eternal Darkness, The Legend of Zelda, Shadows of the Empire, Timesplitters, Bushido Blade, et cetera), I bought the games long after I owned the consoles.
Now onto message boards. I get message boards. I get why they exist and why there's one up for almost every company that says they care about how they interact with their fans/the public. I've posted on a handful of message boards, each time thinking that the experience will somehow be different and I wouldn't be as much of a thread/post killer as I have been in the past.
Turns out this is still the case.
Back in June I joined the forums for the Shadow of the Eternals game that Precursor Games is in the process of developing. I started posting pretty early on in the forums and all was going well. Then I didn't visit for a couple of days and when I returned, it was that lost feeling I used to get when I went back to school after being sick for a couple of days. Threads had taken off, new topics six to seven pages in had started, developed and been completed. In other cases, I would add my thoughts to a thread and the thread would then die/not be replied to. I'm not saying it was a bad/negative/insulting response, it just happened to be the end of the conversation.
This kind of thing has happened a number of times before, on the Reaper Miniature forums, the IMDb message boards, the Draconian forums and even the [Enforcer] forums. And then there's Reddit. . . blarg.
Often times, I don't respond as I become very self conscious about what is being said and how my response will be over analysed. There's a part of me that would like to be more active in forums, especially with companies that I really like and would like to promote, but often times I get distracted or forget to visit the forums and when I came back, I would feel disconnected from whatever the discussion has been about.
Maybe this is just me sounding sorry for myself, but it's been something that I've been thinking about recently, especially with the games that I've helped fund via kickstarter and Indiegogo, each having a forum/message board/discussion area. I just don't have the time/energy/chutzpah to be as active as I want to be with all the things/people/places that I like. As it turns out, time is a commodity.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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