Homefront and the questions it raises

The launch trailer for Homefront was released at PAX East over the weekend and I have to say that it looks pretty damn awesome. I love the classic rock!

Now you will notice in the trailer it advertises "violent, shocking and brutal" as a quote from GamesRadar, and that is a whole other beef of mine to begin with, but I honestly could have high hopes for this game because it set itself up to be mentally challenging and thought provoking (something I think would be great for our industry). A game about North Korea invading America, with themes of culture clash, xenophobia, and in general not just another Tom Clancy-ish war thriller would be a fabulous break from the Call of Duty franchise.

Now the first thing that really concerns me about this game is that it is reportedly very short (thanks Escapist). Now to claim, "well a person of average skill will take 3 hours longer to play it" is saying that you count difficulty curve as a way to pad out game length which is unacceptable. If you have such an amazing story because you hired famed writer and director John Milius to do your game, I would think you would want to make the most of your investment. Of course there is a separate question of the differences of writing for a videogame over a book or movie, but that is another topic for a future post!

A prevailing argument is that a large bulk of their resources went into developing the multiplayer experience. I am sure they are out there, but the only AAA strictly single player FPS to come out in the last 4 years without mp I can think of would be Bio Shock, and that game did just A-okay monetizing (as of March 2010 the game was reported to have sold 4 million copies on the XBox alone). Despite their success it seems that developers feel compelled to add a multiplayer in their game to compete with COD, but it brings up the same concerns that I raised for competing with WoW.

Despite pretty damn good reviews so far, Homefront will make me sad for what it could have been and represented. I suppose it is the same argument that has been presented time and time again; that in this console generation with the graphics and development costs it is just way too expensive to take a risk, so publishers demand that developers put out cookie cutter games to guarantee a return on investment rather than take the high risk-high reward route, but there are so many recent and amazing examples that buck this trend. I just wish that I could stand behind Homefront as one of them.