Destructoid Checkpoint: Short and Sweet

My aim this week is to keep things short and sweet, because part of this newsletter will feel a bit preachy. Nobody likes to be told what to do, think, or how to feel, but I’m doing it anyway, because that’s just the week that’s in it.

The $100 million Lord of the Rings game

While not exactly news, the months-old gossip about a new Lord of the Rings game has picked up this week because of a couple of studio names being attached to the project. Some folks are claiming that Warhorse Studios, the devs behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance, are working on it, while others say it’s Crystal Dynamics, the folks behind recent Tomb Raider efforts.

I’m somewhat reminded of the “Bloodborne on PC” rumors, or the recent Half-Life 3 debacle, where people mostly seem to be saying stuff to be involved in the conversation rather than actually having any verified inside scoop. 

The most important part of this entire rumor is that a big-budget Lord of the Rings is almost certainly being made; we can at least be sure of that. This is fantastic news, as LOTR is a blissfully told story of heroes and villains, good and evil, and right and wrong. Antiheroes are boring as hell when you can have Short King Sam dragging Froddo up Mount Doom because friends help friends lock in and get it done.

The really interesting part of any Lord of the Rings game is not whether it exists, but rather which part of Tolkien’s sprawling history it chooses to set itself in. We can only hope that this game is both real and inspired, because there is a lot in Middle-Earth to be inspired by.

The Crimson Desert discourse

I am going to start this portion by saying that I do, in fact, enjoy Crimson Desert. I accept the game for what it is, and its failings are not enough to stop me from enjoying it. The world is fun to explore, the combat is suitably high-octane, and the boss fights, despite their design flaws, are fun, erosive battles that see my character Kliff chucking down more meat than the Liver King. 

I think one of the reasons I am enjoying Crimson Desert so much is that the game retains the old bones of the MMO it used to be before it pivoted to a single-player-focused project. I tend to like everything about MMOs except the other players, so this is scratching an itch I didn’t really know I had until now. 

That said, I find the discourse around the game to be somewhat pathetic and a damning indicator of where we are right now as a hobby. People who love the game seem to be absolutely aghast that someone else might not like it, and folks who don’t vibe with it seem horrified that the rest of us don’t understand how trash it apparently is. 

My social media feed is filled with manufactured outrage being perpetrated by people who seem less interested in games than they are in having people reply to their ragebait. 

Ultimately, the truth is in the math. Crimson Desert launched with a critic score of 78 on Metacritic and a user score of 8.2 (so let’s normalize them to a 7.8 and an 8.2). That’s a mere .4 point difference between them, so definitely not the “critics hate this game and real gamers love it” moment that many people are currently trying to rewrite it to be.

Also, the game was obliterated in Steam user reviews on release day, garnering over 6,000 negative reviews and launching with a Mixed score. It has since recovered because the devs have been working on the elements that both critics and users felt were lacking at launch. 

I shudder to think that this is how every major game release will go this year, as the folks out there who seem brutally insecure about their consumer habits continue to drag our social media feeds into a mire of pointless disagreement over things that don’t actually matter. 

My advice would be that if the simple act of playing games no longer inspires enjoyment, then move on to something you do like. You’ll be happier.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Scott Duwe went to see the Super Mario Galaxy Movie and thought it was pretty neat if you accept it for what it is, not for what you think it should be. - “Film critics have been blasting The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in reviews, and I get it. In many ways, it’s a mess. But this movie is clearly made for young kids or people like me who are aging and grew up with these characters, and it was evident in my theater experience.”

Andrej Barovic takes a look at recent rumblings in RAM pricing. “And amid these developments, RAM manufacturers like Micron were immediately hit with stock dumps, impacting their share prices and driving RAM prices down in certain markets. According to Videocardz (via TrendForce), DDR5 RAM kits in Germany have lost value for the first time in eight months, while the United States has seen a 20 percent decline in certain cases. In China, RAM prices dropped by around $14 in a day, signaling the start of a long-awaited trend.”

Luci Kelemen (who is kind enough to edit this very newsletter!) is pretty certain that video games have turned him into one hell of a typist - “No matter what you think of the coverage, you have to tip your cap to journalists working at the largest publications in the world. At the very least, their secondary skills have to be top-notch. From quick research to fast typing, to the patience of a saint needed to conduct a phone interview, or just masters of multitasking—there’s no way they are just like the rest of us, right?”

And that’s it for this week!