Delay Game

It is 2003 all over again.  If you remember, that was year devoid of big releases, because they all got delayed.  Halo 2.  Gran Turismo 4.  Half-Life 2.  Doom III (not that it mattered since it was boring crap once it came out anyway).  Unreal Tournament 2004.  None of them came out on time, and only one of them (UT2004) even saw release before the following August.

Welcome to Delay Year II:  The Sequel.  It was already known before this week that Unreal Tournament 2007 and Quake Wars Enemy Territory were going to be delayed into 2007.  People keep saying Crysis was delayed, although that is the case just yet, as it was always a Q1 2007 game.  But you can now add the Half-Life 2 Episode 2 / Portal / Team Fortress 2 combo from Valve to list of delayed games.  I pretty much knew that once Valve announced simultaneous release on PC / PS3/ XB360 that we wouldn't be seeing those games before 2007.  They never get anything out on time when it is a single product on a single platform (HL2, DoD Source, HL2EP1 on the PC), so three products on three platforms getting delayed is about as surprising as a Molyneux game being boring and that moron saying something stupid in an interview.

Who benefits here?  EA.  Battlefield 2142, which looks retarded, now has no competition as the "new multiplayer FPS" of the fall. Activision and Insomniac also benefit a great deal from this, although Call of Duty 3 and Resistance are going to sell based on the single player campaigns, so they're not competing for the player's time in the same way that BF2142 is.  People will go through a good single player game and then get back to their multiplayer game of choice.  When your product is just multiplayer, you are drawing from the same pool of customers, and ultimately, the same pool of people that you need to play the game regularly to keep the community busy and made the product appealing to future purchasers.  One of the unintended results of UT2004 having so many features, modes, and mods available was that finding a particular server hosting the exact game type and map you wanted became a crapshoot.  You can wonder why Counter-Strike source still had the same two game modes and remade a lot of the same maps, but the answer is simple:  those two game modes are what people want out of Counter-Strike, and they want to play it on the maps they are familiar with.  CSS has never had a problem when it comes to finding a ton of other people to play online, in any given map.

The funny part here is, and this is speculation more than anything, Quake Wars, UT2007 and Team Fortress 2 are  probably now on a mid-March collision course for hitting retail.  Then again, if I read in January that EP2/TF2/Portal were delayed again until June, I would not be surprised (lack of surprise in delays seems to be a recurring theme lately).  All three games are now not only missing out on Christmas sales, but the fact that December through January and when people have time to get involved in those sort of time consuming games.  College semester breaks.  Holiday week-long vactions.  Snow giving people reprieves from school and work.  To have all three of these games coming out in the spring now puts them up against each other in terms of usage, and the amount of time people have available to simply play games to begin with.  Seems like the ultimately losing situation.  TF2 will fare fine because it has a very unique look and play style to it.  It is also, as of now, coming bundled with EP2 and Portal for only $20.  Can't beat that.  I've now got at least six months to hold off on a video card purchase and get that POS steam working again.  UT2007 will have higher system requirements to contend with, but people jump on next gen engines when the game attached to it is good, and if Crysis is as good as many videos make it out to be, the hard core PC gamers will all be buying new hardware before UT2007 hits.  This is probably going to leave Enemy Territory as the odd man out.  It looks to have the most interesting gameplay of all three, but it gets stuck in the middle:  it is not as scalable as TF2 on Source engine will be, but it is not cutting edge like UT2007 will be.  It isn't going to have the price advantage that TF2 has, and it isn't going to justify hardware expenses the way UT2007 will.  The last thing to hurt it will be the mod scene.  UT2004 and HL2 have completely destroyed Doom III engine games for modding, because the engine focuses too much on worthless lighting effects that make the system requirements higher than they should be for the amount of entertainment any of the games provide (or in Prey's case, a complete lack of entertainment).  Splash Damage did a brilliant job with the freely distributed Wolfenstein Enemy Territory though, so they at least have a chance of carving out a following for Quake Wars.

This also brings up the most hilarious point of all:  it is really, really ease to move on from a hobby when companies are constantly delaying products like this.  When I have time over Christmas break to play games like this, none of them of will be here.  When they come out, I'll be in my last semester and probably not have much time for a single one, let alone three of them.  Between the retarded handling of all three consoles to these software delays, autumn 2006 went from being what looked like the most expensive season of all time to one of the most affordable.  I'll be getting Yakuza on PS2, Vice City Stories on PSP, and maybe M&M Dark Messiah on the PC this fall.  Other than the "good stuff cheap" games you can find a lot of on each platform, those are my only planned purchases for the fall.  The game industry is making it way too easy to lose intersest in this hobby and get into other things.  Brilliant work, fellas.