@Dropleaf:
My friends and I who hardcore love this franchise don’t know who this game is for and I have to buy it behind their backs due to strong opinions against the game. I’m worried that if I give it a chance and it turns out bad, I’ll have sent WOTC a message that what they’re doing is good. We are torn between supporting our beloved franchise and putting up with what ever this “thing” is.
You and your friends are clearly dedicated A&A players who hold the game in high regard, and I can understand your mixed feelings about the AAZ game. For whatever it’s worth, here are a few potentially helpful things to keep in mind as you debate whether or not to buy the new game.
On the point you raise in your last paragraph…
My friends and I who hardcore love this franchise don’t know who this game is for and I have to buy it behind their backs due to strong opinions against the game. I’m worried that if I give it a chance and it turns out bad, I’ll have sent WOTC a message that what they’re doing is good. We are torn between supporting our beloved franchise and putting up with what ever this “thing” is.
…remember that your support of the franchise doesn’t hinge on the single issue of whether or not you buy AAZ. You’re already supporting the franchise by buying the A&A games that appeal to you and by playing them and by discussing on forums like this one, and those things won’t change regardless of what your decision about AAZ end up being.
I understand why you’re concerned that buying AAZ would send a signal to WOTC that they’re doing something right, but I would argue that this isn’t necessarily as big a concern as it seems to be. The concern assumes that WOTC is what economists call a “rational agent”, which can be defined as “an agent that has clear preferences, models uncertainty via expected values of variables or functions of variables, and always chooses to perform the action with the optimal expected outcome for itself from among all feasible actions.” Some economic theorists assume that businesses and consumers and investors are rational agents who act according to logic rather than emotion and who always strive to make the smartest possible decisions. On the surface, it’s a reasonable-sounding assumption…but in reality, businesses and consumers and investors are motivated by a multitude of factors (such as emotion, delusion, greed and unrealistic optimism) rather than just by logic, and they can end up doing spectacularly dumb and self-damaging things. And even decisions which are motivated largely by logic can turn out to be faulty because logic isn’t the same thing as sound judgment and because a decision may be based on information that turns out to be incorrect. The decision to create the Ford Edsel was a thoroughly planned one, but the car still ended up being a huge failure for a whole bunch of reasons; some involved bad timing, and some involved company executives working on the basis of personal preferences and assumptions whose validity was never critically examined.
My point in all of this is that we don’t really know what WOTC’s corporate rationale for AAZ was, so it’s hard to guess what conclusions (if any) WOTC will draw from its eventual sales figures (whatever they end up being). At one extreme, it’s possible that AAZ accurately reflects a unified and planned vision for A&A by WOTC as a whole; at the other extreme, it’s possible that WOTC itself views AAZ as a maverick project, perhaps one that was pushed forward by a specific group within WOTC rather than originating at the top of the company. (This may not be a completely parallel situation, but I’m reminded of the fact that one of the biggest turkeys in the Star Trek movie franchise, Star Trek V, was apparently a project driven by William Shater, who developed the story and directed the film as well as starring in it.)
To return to my earlier point: if companies were rational agents, they would always “give the people what they want,” or at least give the people what companies think they want. If that were true, WOTC’s output of A&A games would always have been strongly driven by the wishes which the A&A community – which is an active an vocal one-- have expressed over the years. I’m not aware of the A&A community ever having expressed the desire of an A&A zombie game, so I doubt that WOTC even thinks that the community wants it; it’s perhaps either something that WOTC would like the community to want, or a pet project from somewhere within the company.
