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Hardcore Resistance fans believe PS3 exclusive first-person shooter Resistance 2 “was a failure”, according to developer Insomniac.
That’s the stark admission from senior community manager James Stevenson, who told VideoGamer.com in a wide-ranging interview that long term fan feedback “weighed” on him.
Resistance 2, released in November 2008, managed impressive review scores. Tom gave it an 8/10 in his review, calling it “a solid FPS, with moments of brilliance and some top notch multiplayer modes”. At the time of writing, the game’s sitting pretty on an 87 Metacritic score.
For Insomniac, however, negative fan feedback suggested Resistance 2 didn’t turn out as good as the US developer had hoped.
“Resistance 2 got better reviews than Resistance 1,” said Stevenson. “But the long term fan feedback from that game weighed on me.
“The hardcore fans of Resistance 1 were maybe a little bit disappointed. Those folks consistently expressing that – especially GAF [NeoGAF] – it was like your dog turned on you,” Stevenson explained.
“That’s the feeling of it. You had this dog that loved you. You loved the dog, too, but they expressed all this affection for you. And then suddenly the dog bites your hand and it’s that feeling of, ooh, ow, that really hurts.
“The critics loved Resistance 2. Some people didn’t like it, but for the most part… And the Metacritic’s higher than Resistance 1. So we got better reviews than Resistance 1, but the overall opinion of it is that it was a failure by fans, that Resistance 2 was a failure, because maybe the expectations were so high for it.
“But that weights on you more. We talk to journalists a lot but we deal with our fans every day – and when they are disappointed… Reviewers are playing lots of games. They’re supposed to be critical.
“But the people who put their money down on our game, want to see our game be good and want to invest months of their time into our game, spend months of their time leading up to our game watching videos, reading about it, sending us questions, listening to our podcasts, investing hours and hours and being excited for our game, if they’re disappointed then it hurts more than some reviewer being pissy about a game and giving it a seven, well, okay, whatever. I can move on from that. I can ignore that. But fans that are genuinely disappointed are a lot harder to cope with.”
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