The Video Games of Tomorrow Will Always Suffer from the Same Bugs of Yesterday

Playing video games puts you face-to-face with the most bombastic sort of hype imaginable. As a kid, I ate this kind of stuff up. But then again, I was easily amused by any sort of moving pixels on a screen. As an adult who often plays games out of professional necessity, it's a different story. Covering the game industry for the past three years has forced me to confront some harsh, disenchanting truths. Every year, I've been promised the best Call of Duty known to man. Shortly thereafter, I've received another game that's pretty much the same as the previous Call of Duty, only with slightly better graphics.

Every so often, however, something shambles along that makes me forget how empty those promises often turn out to be. This year, that game is Titanfall. It's pretty much guaranteed to be a hit. Publisher Electronic Arts has thrown a mammoth marketing budget behind the thing. And the gaming press has responded ecstatically. IGN called it "Microsoft's killer app," since it's debuting exclusively for the Xbox 360 and One consoles. Polygon ended its review of Titanfall by saying it "has all the makings of the next big thing."

I've taken issue with some of games journalism's unhealthy obsessions before, but I'm not trying to throw any stones here. Because even though I've been frustrated with how stagnant the market for first-person shooters has become in recent years, I couldn't help but get wrapped up in this breathless anticipation. See, games like Call of Duty and Battlefield have coalesced around a twitchy sort of gameplay I find increasingly unpalatable. Titanfall seemed like it was going to bring back the explosive fun of classic titles like Unreal Tournament and Quake—games that cared less about uncanny realism and instead let players indulge in insane acrobatic feats.

So does Titanfall live up to the hype? It's hard to say. I received an early copy of the game late last week, but haven't dug into it enough to form any real thoughts on it yet. This is partly a matter of timing—playing multiplayer games online before they launch can be a lonely affair. The architecture is already in place to support thousands of players, but only a handful of critics and PR reps are strolling these cavernous hallways. One fellow journalist emailed me Monday morning right before the first reviews started to trickle out, expressing his dismay over not being able to find a single proper match to play.

Still, it's hard to hold EA accountable for that. Titanfall was made for gamers, not game critics. The former finally got their first real chance to step into the future of first-person shooters Tuesday at midnight, a future they were told would look something like this:

Instead, judging by a flurry of frustrated tweets and forum posts, many were greeted with this:

This is the way that the future of video games begins: not with a bang, but a faulty server.

In other words, legions of eager players haven't been able to get online and start gleefully killing each other. Sites like Kotaku have been watching Titanfall's progress ever since, and it looks like EA is responding to the issue as swiftly as it can. But this is a problem the company knows all too well at this point. Its 2013 reboot of SimCity was such a technical disaster that Will Wright, the original game's creator and an all-around industry legend, called it "inexcusable." And the latest Battlefield game was clunky enough that angry fans banded together for a class-action lawsuit.

That might sound extreme to people unfamiliar with just how intense the wrath of angry gamers can be. But in their defense, EA hasn't done a great job coming to terms with the technological challenges it keeps facing. If anything, the company's executives have adopted an undue swagger. Late last year in an interview with Polygon, CEO Andrew Wilson went as far as suggesting that the Obama administration could stand to learn some things from EA's problems with SimCity and Battlefield when trying to repair the damage caused by the botched launch of Healthcare.gov.

That was before Titanfall came out, so maybe Wilson was feeling a little cocky. By last week, he'd adopted a much more cautionary tone during a talkback on Twitter, writing: "Building games is very hard… when you push innovation, you miss other things."

I don't doubt that building games is hard. And I'm all for innovation. But shouldn't we focus on making the "other things" work first sometimes too?