While Resistance 2 was received better in critical reception than the original, developer Insomniac Games note the overall opinions of the fans were something else entirely.
It was ”a failure” in the eyes of the hardcore, says Insomniac’s James Stevenson. Fans disappointed ”hurts more than some reviewer” trashing work; ”like your dog turned on you.”
”Resistance 2 got better reviews than Resistance 1,” Stevenson tells VideoGamer.com in an interview. ”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 - it was like your dog turned on you,” he explained, referring to NeoGAF.
”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,” continued Stevenson.
”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.”
We got our hands on Resistance 2 and dished our thoughts on Insomniac’s sequel. Did you enjoy the second instalment of the alien invading franchise, videogamer? Resistance 3 has been spotted, in a manner of speaking, on a movie set billboard.
