In the films industry, literally millions of pounds is spent in advertising movies, producers release trailers to the general public, they talk with actors in the movie on every talk show in the universe, but most of the money is thrown into adverts and posters placed ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE! On TV, on radio, in bus stops, on buses, on billboards, on trains and on every website on the Internet not matter how obscure. To paraphrase Futurama, soon we will have adverts in our dreams.
However one method that's become very popular is to have a tie-in video game, but in most cases the game turns out to be a rushed, badly designed mess. Why is that? Why do most movie licensed games turn out to be giant flops? Well here is my answer to this:
The First problem is that the game is generally stuck with the plot that the movie's based on, so the developers have to somehow stretch out that plot which is supposed to last 2-3 hours to rough 8-10 hours of a video game or sometimes the game stays as long as the movie so huge chunks of the plot and character development have to be cut out, which leaves a dissatisfying result for everyone.
The second problem is that the game-play is generally extremely repetitive and boring like for example lots of really short levels and no reason to play them after you finished them once, or the developers borrow elements from other games but does not know how to work it in to the movie-licensed game, for example the new Thor game tried a hack and slash method of fighting and a leveling up system similar to God of War but that didn't work because there was only 3 enemy types in Thor, the upgrade system wasn't as balanced as God of War and while the special moves in Thor, while looking good for the first few times lose their appeal when your doing to destroy every enemy.
But the biggest problem with movie licensed games is that the movie's producers give the developers of the game a criminally short time to make the game, mainly so it can coincide with the movie's schedule. Basically the producers want to game to be released at the same time as the movie or before the movie is even shown in cinemas, in a general sense this gives the developers less than a year to make the game. This is an extremely short time considering that most games today have development times of up to 3 years and even more in other cases.
I know they have been some good movie-licensed games such as Spider-man 2 which offered a lot of open world freedom with races and exploration tokens throughout the city and it was fun because the web slinging was very fast and fitting with the character. Also the new transformers game is apparently not that bad with some pretty good action.
If we can have more games like these with decent mechanics, good controls and game-play that isn't mind-crushingly repetitive maybe we can lift the curse of bad movie tie-in games, we've proven that we can do it so lets be the generation known as the time when movie licensed games stopped sucking and started being good.
I agree. If developers and film producers can think of ways in which a game has more than one idea in its levels, not like dungeon crawlers, and then create mechanics, or develop well used mechanics to suit, then that should make the game more of a decent hit.
ReplyDeleteThey will of course have to think about how the plot could fit in. Unless the film were based off of a novel, then dleleted parts of the text could be integrated into the gameplay to increase its length, or add varying action scenes. A good way is to create a huge open world, like in Spiderman 2, so that players have the freedom to choose what side missions they like, rather than following a linear storyline.