Shortly after Grand Theft Auto 3 came out, a recurring topic on GTA message boards was, “Do you think we will be able to swim in the next one?” There was an aggressive group of players who reached for reasons why the ability to swim in a GTA game was “stupid” and “pointless.” (Never mind the franchise was hugely popular in part because it was seen by many as an “everything simulator.”) One side of the debate casually thought that such a mechanic would be cool. The other side took up arms as if such a suggestion was holy blasphemy, presumably because some people are hyper-defensive of anything they like. (Swimming was indeed introduced in San Andreas, and when Grand Theft Auto 5 released, the very first freeroam activity I engaged in was riding a Sea-Doo straight into the ocean and swimming off of it for no other reason than it was fun. Go figure.)
Similarly, the first time I played Perfect Dark Zero and witnessed the NPC combatants jumping over my bullets in the combat simulator, I logged into internet forums to see if the player-character was also capable of the same gymnastics. Perhaps you’ll notice a pattern emerging in one of the responses: “What are you? A circus clown or something? Why the hell would you want to leap around like a [insert expletive here]?” When Halo 2 released, I asked a forum why the sound design of the guns didn’t pack a satisfying punch on my surround sound system. The sole response was “no.”
More recently, I took to the Steam forums to ask those who had played the Mortal Kombat 1 beta to confirm or deny if there were any functions that relied solely on a right thumbstick (such as using Konsumable or navigating the Krypt in previous titles) because I was frustrated by not being able to play a fighting game solely on a fightstick, which has no right thumbstick. It was clear neither of the responses had actually played the beta, much less read my question past its title, but they had opinions nonetheless. One went so far as to suggest the Mortal Kombat moveset was “never really intended for joysticks…” as if I wasn’t there in the 90s when the first batch of games hit the arcade with—you guessed it—two big ol’ American-style joysticks.
Have you ever been frustrated that the latest racing game doesn’t play nice with that expensive steering wheel you purchased? Well, according to the forum geniuses: that game (it doesn’t matter which game it is, there will be fanatics who blindly defend its oversights) is obviously more of an “arcade racer” and “arcade racers are exclusively designed for gamepads, not steering wheels.” Yet almost ever single racing game I’ve ever seen in the arcade has a steering wheel controller. So why does this community accept “arcade racers” that are uncontrollable by a steering wheel? Rather, why does the part of the community that doesn’t own steering wheels feel the need to voice an opinion on the matter at all?
A current hot topic seems to be: “Why does travel in Starfield rely so much on menus and fast traveling?” Those of us who expected space travel to operate more like No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous have been told exactly why we’re absolute morons for wanting that extra step of immersion that many find boring. I get it. Not everyone has dual flightsticks and a penchant for roleplaying deep space isolation. Not everyone lit up upon hearing Sean Murray’s pre-release promise that if you see a star in No Man’s Sky you can visit it. But I certainly did and so did millions of others. It’s now a genre standard that’s eight years old, set by indie game studios. And while there are definitely assholes on my side of this issue (any issue, really), it seems to me that those who are staunchly aligned against such a mechanic are doing the same thing the anti-swimming GTA players did: reaching for any reason why Starfield is absolute perfection.
(For the record, I have close to 50 hours logged in Starfield as of this writing so I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike it. My disappointment in the lack of tooling around a galaxy has more or less melted in lieu of what the game does right. On the other hand, it does plenty wrong, too, and I suspect the chorus of 9/ and 10/10 reviews are very much on a runaway hype train. Compare it to Baldur’s Gate 3 and you will see it is very much not a next generation title… it’s not even as good as Fallout 4, but I digress.)
We can have it both ways, you know. In fact, previous Bethesda games did just that: gave the player the option to fast travel or travel to a destination in “real time.” (Quotations because the term is relative to its science fictional setting.) Obviously players can’t spend the actual time required to travel to a destination that’s lightyears away, but Elite Dangerous and NMS both found clever ways around those limitations that didn’t require the use of an awkwardly placed loading screen. What I find most hilarious is that the people defending Bethesda’s omission are the ones who got their way and they’re still angry.
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