No Hype is Good Hype

Image courtesy of MoviePilot

The action/adventure game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was released this week to surprisingly high praise from critics and gamers alike. Despite strong word of mouth from games media, the game has been flying rather low in every gamers' radar, mostly due to the fact that it was released on the cusp of the holiday gaming season. Most games released during the late-September/early-October time period get buried under the sheer amount of games released in the fall, not to mention fall victim to more high-profile games like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. Not to say that there was no excitement for the game; it is the first game to use the Lord of the Rings license in over three years, and features a game mechanic (called the Nemesis System) than many believe is the first true example of next-generation gaming. But the moderate hype behind Shadow of Mordor cannot even compare to that of Destiny, Call of Duty, or Titanfall, all games that had massive marketing budgets behind them and major coverage from gaming media outlets.

Shadow of Mordor is a really good game. I have been thoroughly enjoying my time with it and can find very little things to gripe about. I have been looking forward to it ever since its announcement, and I always felt like it had the potential to be a game I would really enjoy. But I never built any hype up for it; Shadow of Mordor kind of floated around in the back of my mind.

On the flip-side, I road the hype-trains for both Watch Dogs and Destiny all the way to the last stop. Those were two games I feverishly anticipated. While I enjoyed Destiny, it definitely did not live up to my expectations; Watch Dogs, on the other hand, was a massive letdown in my eyes. Before I even got my hands on those games, I had already put them up on a pedestal, convincing myself that they would be everything I could possibly want and more.

Hype killed those games for me.

So here is Shadow of Mordor, reemerging from the back of my mind to end up being one of the best games I have played all year. But I wonder: what if I placed the same amount of hype and expectation on it as I did Destiny and Watch Dogs? Would I still enjoy it even if it looked and played the same as it does? Is it a better game because it did not have my own lofty expectations to weigh it down? Maybe.

Having essentially no hype whatsoever has worked in Shadow of Mordor's favor, as it has with other games in the past (Spec Ops: The Line, Dragon's Dogma, and Just Cause 2 are all examples of games that received little to no hype but ended up being hugely popular among critics and gamers). Shadow of Mordor is being called this year's sleeper hit. It is also one of the best-reviewed games of 2014. Everybody is talking about it now, even though no one really gave it a second glance a few months back.

When you think about it, no amount of hype is going to change how good or bad a game turns out. Your expectations for a game have no direct influence on its outcome whatsoever. A game is going to be the end result of the work its development team put into it, and nothing more. So do yourself a favor and get off of that hype train before it even leaves the station.