games / Columns

Gaming 3Rs: GTA Definitive Edition Stumbles, Activision’s Latest Troubles, More

November 22, 2021 | Posted by Stewart Lange
Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition

Well, it’s been a long time but I’m back and so is an all time classic 411mania staple column, the R’s! That’s right, every week I’ll be here with what I think are the Right, wRong and Ridiculous news stories of the gaming week, as well as chatting to you all through the comments you’ve left for me! It’s been a while since I’ve been a regular here having previously hosted this column, the Gaming 5 & 1 (format hasn’t aged well), taking over for Sforcina when he vacated Ask 411 Games as well as a whole host of things over on the MMA page. More recently, you’ll find my Back 4 Blood and GTA Definitive Edition reviews on the page, with more in the pipeline I hope you’ll see by the time I’m back next week!

Hopefully I’ll have a banner, or something cool to post here but it’s only week 1 so lets just make believe and move forward!

Comments

Like any good fluff piece, I want lots of comments to pad my word count and respond to so you know where to leave them! There were a few on the reviews I thought about responding to but who knows if anyone is even reading this. I’m just hopeful I’m catching a few people on the comedown from Survivor Series. Wasn’t it so much better/worse than Full Gear? I can’t believe all of those things took place and they ended the show like that! That was some good/bad shit! Let me know what you thought about the only time of year the 10 people left on the WWE main roster split into teams and go head to head for the supremacy of their brand that they’ve only been a part of for 3 weeks.

The Right

This week, both Playstation and Xbox united to express concern at the ongoings at Activision and Blizzard, with Playstation boss Jim Ryan describing the company as having ‘a culture of discrimination and harassment’ while Xbox man Phil Spencer emailed employees that he was ‘disturbed and deeply troubled by the horrific events and actions’ within the company.

For those unaware, the company has come under huge scrutiny especially over the last 12 months after reports of sexual harassment going unchecked, even seeing an executive leave the company in August when the stock price plummeted as more and more came out about the ‘frat’ culture within the company came out.

This finds itself in the right side of my re-debut due to the fact that finally it would seem the industry as a whole is recognising that this sort of inappropriate behaviour just doesn’t cut it anymore and with the the rivals seemingly seeing eye to eye on alienating Activision Blizzard in the short term can only be a force for even more internal change. As society becomes more openly diverse and we play games made by people from all walks of life (with or without a disclaimer, right Ubisoft?) it can’t continue on and maybe being left from the lists of advertised Black Friday deals by Sony or having Phil Spencer hold his hands up regarding a leaked email as being true will be enough to make some big changes.

 

The wRong

 

 

The Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition released a little over a week ago and it’s been a rather turbulent time for Rockstar and Grove Street Studios, the offshoot team that were tasked with creating the remasters. While you can find my full thoughts elsewhere on 411mania (none of this “on another site” anymore, am I right?) and overall I will say that I actually do enjoy having them accessible on my current gen library with new achievements, I do get the majority of the frustrations. I haven’t experienced any bugs that break the game or I don’t remember from the good old days- cars exploding randomly, falling from the sky, NPC’s just acting weirdly, that kind of thing.

Things like draw distance, rain effect and overall consistency of graphics have all come under scrutiny and this is the first reason this falls into the wRong category this week. Given that the game was revealed very, very late in it’s development despite heavy rumours, they could have quite easily pushed it back slightly without anyone even really having been any the wiser- or even announced it for quarter one or two of 2022. I really feel like anything that involves a game being removed from sale on any platform- PC or otherwise- has no place in modern gaming.

While delays are disappointing, having to shelf a new game while it’s fixed is arguably worse- because sometimes people don’t take it back down from said shelf at all. The other issue it’s created is that we’ve seen online abuse aimed at developers and honestly, it’s just time for this to stop. If you take gaming seriously then that’s wonderful but taking it so seriously that you send people with jobs and families who are unfortunate enough to be able to have you find them on Twitter then that’s really another thing. Put the keyboard down and look past a couple of inconsequential glitches and take your frustrations out on NPCs without consequence.

 

The Ridiculous

 

“Apple must be stopped” is a fairly big statement and one that had it been uttered by, say, a South Park antagonist, then I’d be excited for the upcoming season. But no, this is a fairly slow news week in a reboot of a long forgotten 411mania column so this has come out of the gaming world by way of Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney during a conference in South Korea.

The latest salvo in a rather amusing war between Epic and well, everyone seemingly, is on the back of Apple still refusing to cater to the company on the back of their previous court battle which saw Apple being forced to allow third party payment via their apps. Having raised their hand in victory, the company remain in the shadows with the massive Fortnite being the largest omission from the App Store, which must be costing the company mega bucks despite still performing handsomely across all other platforms. Sweeney also called Google “crazy” for taking a few with third party payments that it doesn’t process, seemingly ticking off arguably the two largest companies in Tech within two breaths.

The funny thing here is not just that Epic would arguably have been forced into different practices had it not been for the mind boggling success of Fortnite (my 2/10 review of the original, long forgotten single player mode is lost to the sands of time). No, the funny thing is the interview where he claims to be “proud to stand with with you and say I’m a Korean.” I can’t help but feel it’s a misguided statement, but a bold one none the less. That really does feel a ridiculous thing to say.

Well, it’s been short and sweet this week, everyone! It’s only going to get bigger and better from here on out, though so please, check back in next week and leave a comment below! You’ll see your name in lights next week, whether just to hurl abuse at me like a true keyboard warrior or to let me know that 411 resurrected the wrong column when they agreed to do this again instead of Ask 411 Games.

I mean, they definitely did, but hey, if it helps my version of it was like the Gillan era of Black Sabbath.

With that, I’ll see you in seven! Feels good to say that again!

article topics :

Gaming 3Rs, Stewart Lange