Its hard to ignore sales, looking at the best sellers every year, 15 of the top 20 sellers will have a multiplayer in their game, in theory multiplayer is a great idea that will make the game better and give it a ton of replayability.

However, thats only true if the multiplayer is fun, has enough people playing it, and had enough time and money put into it to make it worth while.

What we've been seeing lately is medicore single players mixed with mediocre multiplayer, creating a mediocre game, multiplayer when used correctly, is fine, but when its tacked on purely for the sake of sales, all its doing is keeping the single player from being as good as it should be.

But unfortunately, you see games like Vanquish, Mass Effect, and Infamous that are amazing, but dont get the sales they deserve because they dont have multiplayer. Its even gotten to the point that its a "Flaw" if the game doesnt have multiplayer, games had single player only for over 2 decades and they were doing just fine, why do we have to drastically change that?

Im all for innovation, i dont want to play the same game over and over, but if you are going to make a multiplayer, make it because you think you have a great idea for a fun multiplayer, then put the proper time and resources into that multiplayer to make it successful, afterall, if your multiplayer isnt any good, nobody will play it, and its a useless feature, unlike single player that you can pick up and play 20 years later.

As I read through the endless great scores for Skyrim and Dark Souls, seeing perfect score after perfect score, i cant help but wonder to myself "If this game is perfect, what would it be if it were actually polished?"

This isnt a Skyrim or Dark Souls bashing blog, im just pointing them out because they are super popular despite their technical flaws, my experience with Skyrim was filled with low framerates, screen tearing, texture popping, bad jaggies, bad ai, broken quests, bugs and glitches around every corner, the last straw was when the game decided that i didnt need to go back into first person view, and that was when i decided to stop playing it.

Despite all of these flaws, that are frankly inexcusable, Skyrim is still GOTY and selling very well, while games like Vanquish, which is the ultimate Quality>Quanitity game, struggles to sell 1 million.

Why do we do this? Lets go back to Bethesda, a company that hasnt released a game that runs well (That i know of) they couldnt even get a FPS to work right (Brink), if the fans would take a stand one time, and make one of their buggy games flop, they would spend more time polishing thier games and making them work right.

But as it stands, other developers are seeing the success of Skyrim and learning that they dont have to spend all their time and money polishing their games because most fans dont seem to care.

I understand that Skyrim is a very demanding game compared to most, but look at a game like Arkham City, that game is about as flawless as you can reasonably expect from a video game, its an open world (Smaller i understand) but its more detailed, with less jaggies, locked 30 FPS, no screen tearing, no texture popping.

Infamous 2 and Asassins Creed are other examples of open world games that run perfectly fine because they put the work and money into making sure it runs that way.

My point being, please dont set the precedent that its ok to have games filled with technical problems.

FFXII has alot going for it, Great graphics, great story,good cast of characters, an awesome new battle system, great sound, etc etc. I played it for 90 hours in 1 play through and loved it, its probably my favorite game on the PS3, so you can imagine my shock when i read about how many people hated it, and not just parts of it, but the entire game. They hated the lack of side quests throughout the game (Even though they give you an entire planet and 64 side mission later on) They hated the auto attack button (Even though you dont have to use it) They didnt like the story They didnt like the characters Basically, they didnt like that it wasnt a carbon-copy of the other final fantasy games. If this game didnt have the name Final Fantasy in it, only a small % of people would have disliked, all the venom for this game comes from the changes made from the others, why you wouldnt want games to evolve and try new things is beyond me. I have it tied for my third favorite of the series behind 7 and 8, which are my favorite games of all time, tied with 9, and i cant wait for the sequel and Versus.