By Jim Rossignol on September 2nd, 2009 at 2:01 pm.
More online manshoot movie has emerged from the fertile innards of Infinity Ward, this time showing off some flag grabbing in Modern Warfare 2. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find the idea of dudes running around with riot shields when there are rocket launchers and assault rifles on the field rather amusing. “My shield of reinforced plastic will save me!”
Modern Warfare 2 is scheduled for worldwide release on November 10th, and apparently has the most pre-orders of any game in Activision’s history.
02/09/2009 at 14:11 LQB says:
I don’t know how I feel about MW2 or that video. One part of me says “That looks fucking awesome!” while the other side says “I bet it’ll be mostly grenade spam and [insert P90 equivalent here] whoring.”
02/09/2009 at 14:12 paddytehpyro says:
Throwing knives?! Awesome.
I just hope the min spec is similar to CoD4 so I can actually play it :(
02/09/2009 at 14:14 SirKicksalot says:
Anyone else that doesn’t care about the multiplayer? I’m only interested in the campaign. I spent about twenty minutes online in MW and I haven’t even tried the multiplayer of WaW.
But the SP was awesome for both.
02/09/2009 at 14:15 Phill Cameron says:
That’s the first time I’ve seen blood on a screen look like blood on a screen.
02/09/2009 at 14:18 Flint says:
I’m somewhat the same as LQB. One part of me says “That looks fucking awesome!” while the other one is worried tremendously how the multiplayer will most likely be filled with annoying teens who play the game way too seriously and are ready to spam the mic chat full of whiny bilge as soon as you make one little mistake / deviate from the flavour of the month weapon spam.
Admittedly I never played the first one so I don’t have a reference point but a game that’s so ridiculously awaited and pre-ordered and where the multiplayer seems to be the main reason for most people to do so just seems like a breeding ground for people who think losing a match in a computer game is the same as someone murdering your family and using the holes of their bodies as toilets.
02/09/2009 at 14:20 Ansob. says:
I hate Bobby Kotick’s guts for raising the price on this and claiming it’s piracy’s fault for not supporting AAA titles and our fault for tolerating piracy, as the man is essentially taking a shit in the mouths of everyone who ever bought a game legitimately… but I so very badly want this (and I’ll leave statements on Kotick at that, since I don’t want this to turn into yet another DRM thread). It’s more of CoD4 MP which I’m still playing now, and I am such a sucker for gun porn.
In fact, the new guns are pretty much the number one reason why I want this.
Did anyone else notice that FMJ ammo is in as a gun attachment? I wonder if – and secretly hope that – they have an ammo attachment slot now, that would replace Deep Impact and Stopping Power completely (FMJ ammo for Deep Impact, HP ammo for Stopping Power). That would be awesome.
02/09/2009 at 14:21 Jim Rossignol says:
I think Kotick’s reasoning was that games just cost more to make.
02/09/2009 at 14:26 abhishek says:
SirKicksalot : I’m the complete opposite of you. I will only buy this game for multiplayer. The single player of the last one bored me immensely. The completely-on-rails shooting paired with the atrocious respawning just put me off totally.
The multiplayer on the other hand kept me entertained for quite a while, until a pc crash caused me to lose my profile and with it, the desire to level up my character again from the start. I sure hope they will have some sort of persistent profiles this time around. Even a game like Wolfenstein, which gets lambasted for it’s multiplayer aspect, has persistent, online profiles.
02/09/2009 at 14:28 JonFitt says:
Looks good. I played the original with friends on the XBox and there’s no way I could have done half the stuff he did in that trailer with a gimpy controller. I’m tempted to buy it on PC this time.
02/09/2009 at 14:30 TotalBiscuit says:
Kotick’s reasoning is that he wants more money. To paraphrase, he said he would ‘raise prices even more’ if he had the chance.
Kotick is basically a dick and Activision are taking the place of EA on the list of publishers that have thoroughly burned all of their consumer goodwill.
On the subject of the multiplayer, it looks pretty generic and I’ll give it a miss. The mix of arcadey action and pseudo-realism doesn’t do it for me.
02/09/2009 at 14:34 Schmung says:
I spent somewhere in the region of six days woth of my life playing CoD4 on my specsbox. Now, with a semi-decent PC I am faced with a dilemma – do I return to my PC FPS roots and tolerate the uber l337 types, scripters, griefers, lifetime twitch gamers and endless arsing around looking for a decent server or do I get it on the white plastic lump and play with my mates at the expense of knowing I’m not getting the full experience and having to tolerate the 12 year olds on Live. It’s awkward and there’s no way I’m getting both. I’m a bit more of sofa-bound gamer there days and the pad is kinder to my wrists than yet more mousing, but I’m torn. Are there many RPSers that are likely to get this?
02/09/2009 at 14:36 Jim Rossignol says:
Well Kotick is the CEO of a big company “more money” is the fundamental of everything, but his specific reasoning in this case was the cost of development, not piracy etc.
02/09/2009 at 14:38 rocketman71 says:
“Kotick’s a dick” is explanation enough of the price rise for me. BTW, games costing more is not the problem, it is the fact that they feel the need to throw 3x-5x the budget of the game in marketing.
Also, I agree with the fact that Activision is sinking to lower depths than EA ever reached.
02/09/2009 at 14:43 Azazel says:
Ah good old Call of Duty. Long may it keep all the whining teens in the one place.
02/09/2009 at 14:49 Ansob. says:
Jim: his reasoning was that we don’t pay enough to support the development cost of AAA games. I just conglomerated that with the whole piracy/DRM issue, which I will admit is paraphrasing. Sorry. :(
My point still stands, though. If they’re not making enough from sales, the solution is to sell more, not to actively damage your sales number by making piracy even more attractive.
…aaaaaand now I’ll shut up before this does turn into an angry Internet men DRM discussion.
(I’m open to continuing on the forums if that’s okay with Jim and friends, or by email if someone wants to have a sympathetic ear listen to their rant about MW2′s price. ¬_¬)
02/09/2009 at 14:49 Nick says:
Spamming nades makes for a fun game.
Or does it?
02/09/2009 at 14:53 Jim Rossignol says:
Forum rants are welcome. Just be civil :)
02/09/2009 at 14:57 SpoonySeeker says:
“Kotick also created a stir when commenting on the finacial success of Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft, he stated to a reporter “And Tony, you know if it was left to me, I would raise the prices even further.”"
Doesn’t matter why Kotick said he was doing it in this specific instance; Kotick’s the asshole CEO of a games publishing company who doesn’t even play videogames. With what we know about him you’d have to be pretty foolish to listen to anything he’s said without taking a hefty grain of salt as well.
02/09/2009 at 15:02 Gabanski83 says:
I just hope they do something about the rampant cheating in the multiplayer side of it. Not that I ever really enjoyed it much, it just took the piss, with the level of wallhacks, aimbots, etc. Such blatant cheating just put me right off it.
Single player campaign was good though, bit too short, but them’s the breaks.
02/09/2009 at 15:16 lumpi says:
The thing about the newest COD games is that they essentially have the depth (and the length) of a Michael Bay movie. Run forward… EXPLOSION EFFECT!!!!!! duck behind wall… LIGHTING EFFECT!!!!! run forward… DRAMATIC MUSIC!!!! It’s a corridor shooter. An endless cut scene.
While, admittedly, Michael Bay movies are a guilty pleasure for many and make a ton of cash, at least they are ridiculed and get low ratings from film journalists. This, however, will get 10/10 everywhere and will be celebrated as “the best action experience evaaar” because of better graphics and some arbitrary weapon ideas that haven’t been original since the late 90ies.
Sigh.
02/09/2009 at 15:23 diebroken says:
Reminds me of the shield in CS – ha, classic!
02/09/2009 at 15:24 Schmung says:
Lumpi : I think there’s more to it than that. There’s a helluva lot of whizz-bang there, but a large part of the appeal of the Infinity Ward CoD games is the sheer level of polish and the attention to detail that are lavished on them. Despite the FPS genre being nearly two decades old doing it right is still something of an artform and it’s something that IW do very, very well. If you want innovative and thought provoking gameplay then there’s plenty out there. If you like shooting other people in the head then there’s a lot to be said for CoD.
02/09/2009 at 15:26 Spoon says:
You are so right about the riot shields. They could have at least made them those reinforced ones with the little tiny window to look through. But a piece of plastic? lol
The CoD4 had that uncanny valley effect for me. They make the game LOOK very realistic, but it is an arcade shooter. Throw a knife at a guy’s head while he’s wearing a kevlar helmet? Pass…
02/09/2009 at 15:34 Azazel says:
@lumpi
It will get a 10/10 everywhere in an effort to stem the tide of frothing lunatic trolls from metacritic overrunning the area.
Most review sites these days cannot afford to equip their journalists with flaming longswords (+3 vs Regenerating creatures).
02/09/2009 at 15:37 Heliosicle says:
I’m sure I’ll have lots of mindless splodey fun on this, but it niggles at me how the guns have almost no recoil and people move around so twitchily…
02/09/2009 at 15:37 Ansob. says:
lumpi: I think the comparison would be a better one if it were between Call of Duty4/Modern Warfare 2 and, say, the Lord of the Rings films – absolutely nothing original in them, but very snazzily-realised films that were lauded for being good.
No one ever claimed CoD4 reinvented the FPS; it was just extremely solid and visually polished, and that’s what people are looking for in Modern Warfare 2, methinks.
02/09/2009 at 15:40 Über Nerd says:
“Reminds me of the shield in CS – ha, classic!”
Just the shield?
02/09/2009 at 15:40 Jim Rossignol says:
I suspect RPS will give it a score of: Some Words Out Of Subjective Gibber.
02/09/2009 at 15:50 Frye says:
What a stunning looking game. No need for that holier than thou attitude. Yes it will be linear and grenade spammy and no, i probably won’t like it. But heck! credit where credit is due. This will probably be the best game in it’s genre and as such will appeal to a huge crowd. Believe it or not: lots of kids will get their first XBox 360 this year. Not everybody has been gaming for 15 years like some of us and by the looks of it, this is a succesfull next generation of it’s kind. Nothing wrong with that.
02/09/2009 at 15:50 Metal_Circus says:
MANSHOOT.
02/09/2009 at 15:53 toni says:
COD4′s campaign and MP did absolutely NOTHING for me (I would compare it to 80s action movies like CityCobra regarding quality, lol) but I can attest to its stability, polish and simplicity. It’s just not the game I would be playing for long (completely different design philosophies I appreciate) or the propaganda I (personally) like to hear in a game (especially that unreflected) nor a story that gripped me in any way.
the “unlimited spawn-wave” mechanic is as old as it gets but since there are still ppl satisfied with that mechanic they won’t change it. I hate it when I have to cross a trigger to make enemies stop pouring out of the same shack that can barely hold a horse and a cart, not to speak of hundreds of infidels.
Franchises are not about innovation and progression, they are about repetition and refinement and that is what Infinity are the experts of imo.
02/09/2009 at 15:54 KilgoreTrout XL says:
Whoa. That looks damned good.
02/09/2009 at 15:55 Jim Rossignol says:
The CoD4 campaign was great fun. I don’t have much time for multiplayer, however.
That said, I had a good crack at CoD5′s multiplayer, and that was ok.
02/09/2009 at 15:58 Ging says:
toni: They’ve already stated that they’ve moved away from the infinite waves of spawning enemies – whether that’s true or not will become evident in a few months!
02/09/2009 at 16:04 Ansob. says:
I feel sort of guilty admitting this, but I really liked the plot to CoD4. It was suitably Tom Clancy-ish nonsense, but it got the heroic special forces team right.
Jim: CoD5 MP was a reskinned CoD4 MP with WWII weapons and completely broken SMGs. It was pretty good, and it’s less stale these days, but CoD4 did it first and did balance better (also, the tanks – egads, the tanks).
I paid £15 for WaW, which is more or less what I would have paid for a professional-grade total conversion of CoD4 into a WWII shooter. The fact that it had a campaign was an unexpected bonus (even if it was a sort of rubbish campaign).
Unrelated: didn’t the site automatically log you in to your forum account before, or am I just dreaming?
02/09/2009 at 16:07 Theory says:
I hope everyone realises that whole trailer was scripted, or at the very least played against easy bots. Real people don’t behave like that.
02/09/2009 at 16:14 Xercies says:
Meh Call Of Duty is tired as shooters go, but I know this will be a big mega seller hit that everyone will love. Sometimes i dislike modern gaming at the moment.
And that Kotick guy can go to hell, he doesn’t have to have more budget, this looks the same as COD4 so I bet they’ve reused nearly everything that was in COD4 in this and maybe changed a few textures. How is that useing more budget that yo need to pay more.
I have no love for activision anymore, there CEOs are pricks, there strategy is really crap(sell one game every year or better then that sell three of the same game every year(look at Guitar hero whore)) and they got the gaul to blam us for raising the prcie by a tenner.
Any good game that comes out from them I will pirate and I will not care.
02/09/2009 at 16:15 lumpi says:
Not denying it was polished. Or had engaging cut-scenes.
I’m denying, however, that there is “plenty of other stuff, if you’re looking for innovation”, because, well, there isn’t.
There must be some award, besides teh moneyzzz, for trying something deeper regarding gameplay and innovation. And it would appear logical, that not giving a default 10/10 to $100 million dollar production (because it’s sooo polished) would be a nice start.
Imagine, a $100 mil, AAA title, with amazingly polished graphics, Hollywood-style presentation, advertised and hyped into oblivion… getting a 6/10 on Metacritic for being bland and uninnovative, gameplay-wise. Haven’t seen that, lately.
But I guess I’m just a troll for even thinking that. :(
02/09/2009 at 16:22 torchedEARTH says:
I feel an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by that clip.
02/09/2009 at 16:25 lumberjack_wannabe says:
More shootier and shieldier than CoD4. Just needs zombies.
02/09/2009 at 16:31 Ansob. says:
I’m fairly sure those were real 360 players. Bots don’t get gamertags on consoles.
Agreed; there are one or two things, though (on the MP side)
Don’t forget that CoD4′s gameplay was relatively polished as well, and that the perks were a nice addition to multiplayer.
I guess it boils down to an ethics issue, but I don’t think you should be penalised for doing something unoriginal amazingly well. Someone who produces an extremely polished, just-plain-fun FPS with gameplay that hasn’t really evolved since the origin of the genre should still get rewarded significantly, much like a well-scripted action flick with a large SFX budget isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
An extremely polished, innovative game should get bigger and better rewards and that isn’t happening right now, but that’s not really my point. Let’s not forget that gaming and movies are also about having fun.
02/09/2009 at 16:45 Steelfists says:
http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14209881
A profile of Bobby Kotick from The Economist. It was actually printed, a rare honour. Gamers may not like it, but he is certainly making the right choices business-wise, and also helping the gaming industry as a whole.
02/09/2009 at 16:55 lumpi says:
Oh my… I don’t want to drag COD down for personally being disappointed with it (and the trend the game produces). But at the same time I feel protective about the ideals of innovation and risk-taking that spawned many amazing FPSs in the 90ies that truly brought something new to the genre (Thief, System Shock, Tribes, AvP, Half-Life, Deus Ex, Rainbow 6, Goldeneye/Perfect Dark, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament…)
IMO, if they exclusively aim for unoriginal, polished entertainment, their award should be money, and nothing more (and who said, btw, that innovation couldn’t lead to a financial success as well).
It still makes me cringe, for example, to think of “Halo 3″ having won EDGE’s “most innovative game of 2007″ award for providing a good online service. Against Portal? Something’s seriously fucked up with that. Maybe they were just looking for attention and did the “let’s say the opposite of what people expect!” thing. I dunno. It was just a turning point for me, that made me think more critically about games like COD4-2 and the hailing of fast-forward, zero-innovation comfort gameplay. There’s just so much potential lost. Think of all the talent, people who could think up the next “Thief” or “System Shock”, now being hired en masse to “optimize accessibility” of the 6th(?) COD title… It’s sad, isn’t it?
02/09/2009 at 17:04 Chemix says:
Did anyone pay attention to the end of the video, before the knife throw? The server they were playing on went down and it swapped out to another server in 20 seconds, without breaking the previous game flow. How this will work for privately rented dedicated servers is… unknown, I don’t know if it can, but for official servers and server clusters may be able to do it, though I’ll think we’ll have a lot more pay for admin servers and a lot less servers in general. Beyond that, it’s a cool feature, hell, it’s bloody awesome. Plexiglas shields are less realistic, but it’s much easier, and probably more enjoyable to use in a fast paced game. Can you really imagine your view being limited to a zoomed in 1.5 inch tall by 5 inch wide viewhole (probably scaled to 4″x15″ zoomed)? In a shoot em up like COD5. I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce MW and not sound like I’m trying to make a questioning gesture noise (mwuh) whereas, I can pronounce Cod, like codfish or codpiece. I could just say Modern Warfare 2, but that’s 5 syllables.
I wish there more rewards for originality, but as far modern war-fighting in a semi-can-be-fun-setting, this works fairly well.
02/09/2009 at 17:08 Dracko says:
Dracko, civility plz – RPS
02/09/2009 at 17:08 Schmung says:
Chemix : That’s ‘cos it’s footage from the 360. People jumping out and killing the game because they were getting killed/got a phonecall/tripped over the plug was a source of serious irritation to console players. Nice if it works.
02/09/2009 at 17:20 Dracko says:
Because rage-quitting never happens on PC.
02/09/2009 at 17:32 Heliocentric says:
On the RSI front i’ve been using my 360 pad whenever its even slightly suitable, from driving a tank or heli in battlefield 2 to a number of platformers/adventure games. Even slower games using x-padder to use the analogue as a mouse. Playing bookworn adventures or settlers while lying down. Annoyingly a good number of console ports are actually not playable with the 360 pad, even when the game would otherwise be suited.(resi4, age of booty, fable etc)
02/09/2009 at 17:43 JonFitt says:
@Schmung: I am also having the same dilemma as you. Friends on xbox, or better game on PC.
@Jim: SP CoD4 was a good diverting weekend, MP CoD4 is an excellent competitive team game with plenty of room for team tactics and personal glory. It kept me entertained for many months.
Also, I can imagine Kotick at the monthly investor call “Well we decided that we’d like to make some money, but not too much money because nobody wants that, right?…”
02/09/2009 at 17:50 Ansob. says:
Because ragequitting on a dedicated server doesn’t cause it to stop working for everyone else.
Who plays on listen servers, anyway? Pah.
02/09/2009 at 18:12 lumpi says:
@Dracko: Stay classy, friend. I read your reply before Mrs RPS washed your mouth with soap, and it only furthered my impression that the current gaming market is a love-story between wallstreet-genius CEOs and douchebag gamers.
This game has the soul of an MTV reality show. It is trash. Only with $100 million dollar budget used entirely on streamlining every bit of creative risk from the game. Congratulations on making so much money, Kotick. He sure deserves an “Innovation Award” from EDGE.
02/09/2009 at 18:20 Mal says:
I think Jim’s reasoning is that gamers are willing to pay through the nose for MW2, so he might as well make some extra money.
02/09/2009 at 18:25 A-Scale says:
CEOs like Kotick (sp?) are incentivized to raise prices as high as people will pay. It is the consumer’s incentive to pay as little as possible for that product. The only way that games will not continue to be price hiked is if consumers refuse to buy the game in large enough numbers to make the price raise a net loss. People should either not buy the game, or otherwise pirate it if they want to show their disapproval for the price increase. Bitching and still buying the game will most certainly not do anything.
02/09/2009 at 18:37 Xercies says:
@Mal
Thats the problem i have with the price hike though, they’ve done it on a game they know to be popular so if it sells well they can automatically put in their spreadsheet price kike since cod 6 sold very well with the price hike. Meaning we will get games later on in Activision and maybe other companies with higher price games.
And theres nothing we can do, no amount of a few peopele pirating it or not buying it will make a difference since all the people will get the game no matter the price hike.
Very Clever on Activisions part.
02/09/2009 at 18:39 bookwormat says:
“I think Kotick’s reasoning was that games just cost more to make.”
Games can be made with a $0, $10Million or $100 Million budget. They do not cost more to make than 10 years ago – Big Companies are just investing more. I remember playing a lot of fun professional games that did not cost $100 million to make.
I think Kotick’s reasoning was more that if he invests more and more money, he can sell more and more copies for more and more money. Just like with an action movie, where every extra explosion sells another million tickets.
Maybe this is really the best way to maximise profit.
Or maybe it would be smarter to invest less and sell at the price most people feel comfortable with.
Or maybe they would sell three times as many copies of the current game with all its content when they only demand 50% of the current price.
Who knows? I think it’s naive to think that Kotick does, just because he is the CEO of a big company. Big companies are usually very chaotic and very slow to react to change.
02/09/2009 at 18:45 Heliocentric says:
Look, if you don’t like the price don’t buy it. Thats a language all parties understand. If you do buy it don’t moan for gods sake.
02/09/2009 at 18:52 bookwormat says:
@Heliocentric was that comment a response to mine?
Because I did not complain about anything in my post, and I indeed never bought or played a CoD title.
I was just picking up a discussion about what is the most profitable way for a company to sell video games.
02/09/2009 at 19:00 Jimbo says:
This can be pre-ordered from coolshop.co.uk for £24. I’ve used them a couple times before without any problems.
I’m a campaign kinda guy myself, though the MP in COD4 was pretty excellent. There was quite an interesting discussion on the latest Bonus Round, with some PR guy from IW, which brought up the idea of selling a seperate single-player only SKU alongside the ‘full’ version (not for MW2, just hypothetical) – this is an idea I’ve advocated ever since the industry decided every FPS needs identical multiplayer built in. I hope it happens sooner or later.
^^ If you don’t think COD4 had it’s fair share of innovation, I think you are crazy.
02/09/2009 at 19:16 suibhne says:
A bit surprised at the frothing backlash against CoD4 here. Sure, it was a wholly mainstream game, but some of its storytelling (the opening drive and execution, the nuclear detonation coming right after the “Blackhawk Down” mission) was genuinely fresh and powerful. And multiplayer is beautifully designed in many ways. For example, it still offers the best balance between engaging character advancement/unlocks and the need to keep new and experienced characters on an even playing field, equipment-wise.
I have a lot of anticipation for CoD:MW2. We all pretty much know what we’re getting, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean it can’t offer lots of entertainment and maybe even some smart design.
02/09/2009 at 19:18 Whatzebah says:
I remember paying £70 of my hard earned wages on Turok for the N64 when it first came out.
I’m more than happy to bend over and take one, because I want the game its that simple… I shelled out for Turok because I wanted it, I will do the same for MW2 because I want it.
Inflation will always be present in our economy, why should the gaming industry differ? Sure its not a small increase in price but if you look at the price of SNES games on release they were £30-£40, Surely after 20+ years the price can jump up a little even if they slap it on in a lump percentage rather than gradually increasing it over the years.
I remember when a can of coke was 27p in the local shop… NOW ITS 60p! :O
02/09/2009 at 19:42 Starky says:
You know the one thing I hate about the community around this site is the tend towards anti-mainstream idiocy. The people that clearly decide the quality of something based upon how many people liked it and then decide the opposite of the majority.
CoD4, Fallout 3 – both examples of great games that every time there’s a post about them on this site, dozens of these special-unique-snowflakes show up to bad mouth how rubbish the title was, and how everyone who liked it was an idiot (if not overtly then implied heavily).
The same people who’ll embrace every crappy little (or good little) indie game that comes along, not based on the quality of the game, but simply because it’s indie.
CoD4 was a solid action shooter, it never tried to be anything more – yes it was mainstream and didn’t exactly push innovation (though I’ll agree with the above poster, it had it’s fair share) but Infinity Ward are good developers, and CoD4 regardless of personal taste was a good game.
It is possible to not enjoy something yet still appreciate the quality of it, to dislike something personally without labelling it as crap. Worst of all without labelling those who did enjoy it as idiots/lesser/less-sophisticated or some such nonsense.
CoD4 was a great game, and I’ve no doubt MW2 will be too.
Infinity ward like Blizzard don’t innovate so much they risk alienating the fans. They take existing idea’s and polish them to a sheen and quality that earns them millions upon millions of sales, and rightfully so.
I’ll take high quality derivative work over broken innovation any day of the week.
Besides, CoD4 had a great single player, a good plot – not great, but better than your average action movie, and much better than your average action/shooter game – great game play, great set pieces and a few missions that pushed above good shooter level and into brilliance – the flashback sniper mission springs to mind first and foremost.
It also had a couple of brave storytelling choices that worked very well in my opinion – having the player sit through a car ride intro that lead to his death really set the tone, and then the famous nuking. There are not many games brave enough to kill off one of the characters you play as in such a way, even if the main character was the British SAS bloke, that American you played for a good number of missions before he died.
While I’m at it, go listen to a good pop song and let yourself enjoy it – just because you like metal/rap/dance/whatever shouldn’t close your mind to all other genres regardless of quality.
02/09/2009 at 19:44 Legionary says:
Is it acceptable to charge more for a game because it was more expensive to create?
Is it acceptable to charge more for a game because you spent more on the marketing?
02/09/2009 at 19:44 Post Maker says:
Video games are a serious topic and should never be taken lightly.
02/09/2009 at 19:46 Starky says:
“I remember when a can of coke was 27p in the local shop… NOW ITS 60p! :O”
70-80p in some shops in the city centre where I live.
It’s insane it’s actually cheaper to go to farmfoods/wilkinsons (both also in the city centre) and buy a 2 litre bottle than it is to buy a 330ml can, or worse a 500ml bottle (£1).
02/09/2009 at 19:50 Vinraith says:
@Starky
I agree with your general premise (and particularly with Fallout 3, which is unfairly maligned to an absurd degree) but I would point out that while MW’s single player is (I’ve heard) excellent it’s also preposterously short. 6 hours of game for $50 is just silly, unless that 6 hours is one of the best single player experiences in history with high replayability.
Consequently, anyone of the (vast number) of gamers who don’t play much/any MP won’t have much use for the game, and can’t help but see it as something of a rip-off.
02/09/2009 at 19:50 Nick says:
Whatzebah: Its more that every other game released is around 29.99 – 34.99, I don’t think inflation has anything to do with it at all.
CoD4 was fun, though very lazy at times (ie every single constantly respawning enemy appear at the same window/roof space you just shot his friend in style encounter, no need.) and a little on the short side for the price they were asking. It had great gaming moments and terrible game crimes, often in the same level, but overall it was worth playing.
I shall be waiting for it not to cost so much I think.
02/09/2009 at 19:52 Starky says:
“Video games are a serious topic and should never be taken lightly.”
Serious topics can be taken lightly, and light topics can be taken seriously.
Video games can be a very serious subject, not the games themselves or the content but the business – no business that has revenue in the multiple billions is lightly done.
Serious business is serious business.
02/09/2009 at 19:55 Funky Badger says:
CoD4′ssingle-player narrative was very innovative – moreso than HL2 for example, I would say. The gameplay was not. A typical “slidey” FPS – the actual fighting in F.E.A.R. was better. Multiplayer was pretty slick, mind.
Me much prefers more tactical shooters (i.e. I is twitch deficient) – money, choice etc., what’s that you say, L4D2 is out around the same time, oh, okay then…
02/09/2009 at 20:05 Xercies says:
To be honest people saying that this uses an extra budget should really look at what happens especially in 3D art. In 3D art everything is reused to save on money, there is not that much years from COD 4 to MW2 which means that I bet you a heavy amount of stuff in COD 4 is being reused in MW2. Meaning it has no extra budget in the game count which is where it counts. They basically spend a lot more money on advertising which is pretty much their problem because its not proven to work for games and people shouldn’t really be paying more for advertisments which makes them buy it making a loop.
02/09/2009 at 20:08 Funky Badger says:
Xercies: advertising works. For everything.
02/09/2009 at 20:09 Starky says:
@Vinraith
I’d agree for single player only the initial price was more than it was worth, the single player was great, but it was a rental.
No the value in CoD4 came from the multi-player, just like most games in it’s genre. FPS games offer very little value in terms of hours played compared to other genres (RTS, RPG so on) if only the single player is taken into account.
So yes it’s foolish of anyone who’s only going to play the singleplayer to pay full retail on day of release for it – they should rent it or wait for a sale/price drop.
Still, I paid £30 for my copy of CoD4, I’ve played through the single player 4 maybe 5 times (once no hard, then on insane, then on the point tally mode, then with the cheats activates and odd random levels that probably add up to another playthrough if not 2).
I’ve also player over 300 hours of it multiplayer.
Which makes it, for me personally better value than the Orange box, which was universally hailed as amazing value for money. I love the Orange box, and am one of the 0.4% of players to get the Aperture Science achievement (100% complete) in Portal.
That probably took 20-30 hours of gameplay including 4-5 plays of Portal singleplayer.
I’ve played around 45 hours of TF2
And played Episode 2 for around 20.
So in terms of £-per-hour CoD4 offered me more value for money than the Orange box did.
Which really is the thing about video games and any notion of value – hours played is an idiotic measure, because mileage may vary to such an extreme degree from player to player that “20 hours gameplay” is a meaningless statistic on the back of a box.
Only the individual can decide if they think Modern Warfare 2′s price increase is value for money – if it isn’t don’t but it, rent it or wait.
For me, I’ve no doubt it will be so I’ll happily lay my £40 down day one. If I’m wrong and I don’t get the value from MW2 as I did from the first, then hell it won’t be the first time I’ve bought a game at full retail only to get a few hours of gameplay out of.
The worst of which is I think quake Wars: Enemy Territory, paid full retail for that (which I think was £20), played it for a grand total of 25 minutes and never touched again.
02/09/2009 at 20:10 Tei says:
EA say that marketing cost x3 more than developping.
I love this video :-) for not reason at all, that the latest joke :-)
02/09/2009 at 20:13 Vinraith says:
@Starky
“FPS games offer very little value in terms of hours played compared to other genres (RTS, RPG so on) if only the single player is taken into account.”
That’s not as universal as it’s often taken to be. Far Cry 2, the Brother in Arms games, and obviously the Half Life series all offer extremely meaty single player components.
Otherwise no arguments with anything you said.
02/09/2009 at 20:17 SirDorius says:
Apparently in modern warfare a soldier can survive a rocket launcher blast that’s one meter away. that makes me want to join the army
02/09/2009 at 20:33 A-Scale says:
Oh I do so hate this sarcastic, dickish, non-confrontational British style insult. Video games are a media. Media is as important as people consider it to be. If people consider games to be important they will consider it with great pains and heated debate. This kind of sentiment just makes you seem like the same sort of tool who criticized radio broadcasts or television at their inception for being a young media and thereby silly and unworthy of serious comment. Perhaps the most egregious advocates of this position are our dear RPS crew, who seem to hold the incredibly contradictory stances of both studying and writing on games in incredibly minute detail as a means of livelihood, and at the same time deriding that very media as being juvenile and silly. Either games are relevant, mature and serious (as evinced by your laborious efforts to detail them), or they are not. Anything else is just pure hypocrisy.
As to what Activision may reasonably charge for their games: they may charge anything they so choose. Any formula of X hours of play times Y amounts of replayability and Z enjoyment factor are simply irrelevant to Activision’s pricing structure. If they could sell feces for one million dollars a pound and people would buy it, they would be absolutely insane not to. The hype over this game and the solid reputation built by the original Modern Warfare are what will sell the majority of copies, not discussions over the relative amount of innovation or game hours.
02/09/2009 at 20:43 Adventurous Putty says:
Now, now, (some) folks, there’s no need to fill this comments thread with the same kind of counterculturally elitist faux-intellectualism that Brooklyn hipsters use when they listen to obscure indie albums. Yes, unique/innovative/arty games are ultimately more satisfying and fulfilling than the mainstream, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any value whatsoever to less creative but excellently executed games like COD4-2. I, at least, thought the first one was delightful fun, and I daresay even a teensy bit anti-war in the way it portrayed the Americans (blundering) and Brits (ruthless).
02/09/2009 at 20:43 Jimbo says:
I will take COD4′s 5 hour campaign over many, many much longer campaigns from other shooters. I guess it comes down to whether you play games looking for that next great experience, or play games to soak up your free time and see them as a $/hour ratio. I find the latter too depressing to contemplate.
I’ve been playing games for getting on 20 years and I still consider it one of the greatest FPS campaigns of all time. Every minute of that thing was handcrafted, there was not an ounce of fat on it. You think a few hours of padding would have made it ‘better’? Of course not, it was exactly as long as it needed to be. Just like Portal in that respect.
IW took what they started with Call of Duty 2 (I’m referring to the ‘unique’ moments they experimented with in the CoD 2 campaign) and perfected it in CoD4. To me the campaign was one memorable moment after another.
No innovation? Maybe it just felt that way because it was so polished and we’ve become used to innovation coming from ‘diamonds in the rough’ – CoD 4 was just a diamond. From the car ride assassination, to the Spectre, to one of your player characters dying slowly in a nuclear fire – everything they tried came off brilliantly.
On top of that, they practically redefined the FPS multiplayer structure for the entire generation.
02/09/2009 at 20:44 Bhazor says:
Reply to Starky
“I’ll take high quality derivative work over broken innovation any day of the week.”
That is why your kind will be the first against the wall come the revolution. Always reward innovation over polish, always.
Also I just don’t think the campaign was half as good as everyone seems to claim. It was only about 25% shooter with the other 75% being mini games or semi-interactive cut-scenes. Sure it was polished but 90+% and universal acclaim? Get, ye, fucked.
Compared to COD 2′s pacing and running battles it’s a huge step back. Brothers in Arms is better anyway.
02/09/2009 at 20:45 Adventurous Putty says:
Oh, and A-Scale, I can’t speak for the RPS guys, but I’m pretty sure that they deride the genre for being so immature and senseless precisely BECAUSE they want it to mature, not because they somehow prefer the status quo to the Holy RPS Pantheon of Great Games (Thief, Portal, etc).
02/09/2009 at 20:55 Vinraith says:
@Jimbo
“I guess it comes down to whether you play games looking for that next great experience, or play games to soak up your free time and see them as a $/hour ratio”
A truly great experience (that fits the desires of the player well) will demand quite a bit of replaying, so usually the $/hour ratio measure works out pretty well asa quantitative metric of game quality. There are notable exceptions, of course. I don’t get the sense I’m likely to play MW’s campaign more than once (nor am I likely to consider it an exception to the rule), if for no other reason than that it’s not “my type” of shooter. I get a lot of mileage out of tactical shooters and open world shooters, but run-and-gun linear shooters rarely warrant a replay for me.
“Just like Portal in that respect. ”
Portal was considerably cheaper at launch.
02/09/2009 at 20:56 Funky Badger says:
That is why your kind will be the first against the wall come the revolution. Always reward innovation over polish, always.
Wrongity wrong wrong wrong wrong. Innovation without polish is worthless – because no one will play the bloody thing.
+1 for A-Scale’s dickish overly-confrontational manly yankee style of insulting bravado. Much prefer that.
02/09/2009 at 20:58 Vinraith says:
Innovation without polish is fine, actually, but Starky didn’t say “unpolished,” he said “broken.” Innovative but broken games not only aren’t worth much themselves, I honestly think they set the industry BACK sometimes. I wonder if one of the reasons you never see RPG’s like Bloodlines is because Bloodlines was so broken on release that it didn’t sell well. The industry learns the wrong lesson, concludes no one wants that style of game, and away it goes.
02/09/2009 at 20:59 A-Scale says:
In the end I saw it as having a lot of reverence for the military. You see all of these heroics done by men bigger than life, yet at the end all of their hard work saving the world is covered up by a faux newscast just to keep people from flipping out about a nuke nearly causing havoc. And that’s just a day in the life of these brave men. I felt stronger support for our military after finishing the campaign, particularly given my personal knowledge of the government white washing incidents which are too shocking or underhanded for public consumption.
The flight mission that tasked you with shooting guys at night was completely innovative. Dying in a nuke was completely innovative. Being shot in the face and fading to black was completely innovating. These complainers know not what they say.
You seem to have missed the point. They spend all day, all week, studying, analyzing and critiquing the CURRENT games in minute detail, yet at the end of the day still try to say “har har look at how immature and silly all of this is. Let’s write another column with “wot” in the title just to show our disdain for childish gaming”. They can’t have it both ways. They may WISH for games to become even more mature, but if games are currently not a mature genre they should stop treating it as such. I think they doth protest too much. All the same, this is my favorite PC game website and I appreciate all their hard work, I just want to see them give credit to the industry for making it possible for them to do the work they do. They could hardly find enough to write about if this industry was truly as immature as they have often alluded to it being.
02/09/2009 at 21:01 A-Scale says:
If you’re going to say something, you might as well have the balls to say it outright rather than being a pest who just implies what he feels. Pull off that stiff upper lip, chap. There is nothing more annoying than a perpetual covert whiner.
02/09/2009 at 21:02 Vinraith says:
If one treats video games as a serious subject, one isn’t allowed to have fun with them? One isn’t allowed to joke about them? What an unpleasant little world you must live in.
02/09/2009 at 21:05 A-Scale says:
Your straw men are more obvious than the ones at Burning Man.
I am simply arguing that someone who writes about a media in a mature fashion (in depth analysis of plot, gameplay, development, etc) is not in a position to also critique that industry as being immature and silly. Gaming is as legitimate a medium as film or television, and stating otherwise when one is employed doing the very same work as a Roger Ebert just smacks of hypocrisy.
What that has to do with cracking jokes, I do not know.
02/09/2009 at 21:08 Vinraith says:
@A-Scale
I already know I’m going to regret this, but what are you interpreting as “critiquing the industry as being immature and silly.”
Also, why precisely can’t parts of the industry be mature and other parts BE immature and silly? Why is something must something as inhomogeneous as the gaming industry be universally treated as one or the other?
02/09/2009 at 21:09 Vinraith says:
Damned lack of an edit function, delete “is something” from the second sentence of the second paragraph.
02/09/2009 at 21:16 A-Scale says:
The entire discussion a few months back about why the RPS blokes use “wot” in their headlines on a regular basis. A good number of people agreed that it was stupid and annoying, to which one of the RPS fellows replied that they only used it because they wanted to show that they feel that gaming is silly and immature, and thereby they don’t take it seriously. This is from people who rely on this “silly” industry for the very food they sustain themselves with. I tried to find the particular thread, but Google is coming up empty handed.
Immature offerings in a mature media to not make the media immature. Harlequin love novels do not make the medium of writing any less sophisticated or mature; they are simply of a lower grade than other offerings in that field. The same is true for games.
02/09/2009 at 21:23 Jimbo says:
“Just like Portal in that respect. ”
‘Portal was considerably cheaper at launch.’
Hence ‘in that respect’, immediately after talking about them both being exactly as long as they need to be.
An 8 hour Portal would have just been rubbish, whatever the cost. An extra 4 hours of padding stuffed into CoD4 would have made it worse quality (and thus worse value), not better.
Obviously I was reacting to people saying the SP campaign should have been longer for the price – once you start trying to factor in multiple playthroughs, all bets are off.
Personally, I think $/hour is a terrible metric for measuring any form of entertainment – I’ll take the 1st best experience over 2nd through 10th combined any day of the week. If I was certain I would enjoy MW2 as much as MW1, I wouldn’t think twice about paying Acti’s RRP – but I’m not certain at all though, so I won’t.
I completely agree with your next post however. Poorly executed attempts at innovation can be counter-productive.
02/09/2009 at 21:25 Alec Meer says:
You’ve rather put your own spin on things there, Mr Scale.
02/09/2009 at 21:27 A-Scale says:
I was not the one who claimed that gaming was silly/immature, my dear sir.
02/09/2009 at 21:29 Vinraith says:
@Jimbo
It may just be a personality difference. The games I enjoy most tend to consume hundreds of hours, but then my favorite genres arew grand strategy and open-world RPG’s, both characterized by long play throughs with high replay value. FPS’s usually don’t work that way, and you’re probably right that measuring them by the same metric is unreasonable. I loved the hell out of Half Life 2, but I’ve only played through it twice (for a total of maybe 60 hours). That 60 hours is poorly proportioned to how much I enjoyed the game, though.
On the other hand, I’ve played hundreds if not thousands of hours of Morrowind, Guild Wars, Europa Universalis 2, Gal Civ 2, and the like. There, the amount of hours played very much IS proportional to the enjoyment I get out of those games.
02/09/2009 at 21:31 Dominic White says:
I’m going to say something controversial here:
I think CoD4 worked better on the 360 than the PC. The slower aiming, slower turning and lower player-counts made for longer, more dramatic gunfights and less spam. It’s not a huge difference, but I thought it made enough of one to count.
On the PC, it kinda devolved into a hyper-twitchy headshooter, which seems to be the trap that pretty much every game short of Section 8 has fallen into as of late.
02/09/2009 at 21:34 Vinraith says:
@A-Scale
“The entire discussion a few months back about why the RPS blokes use “wot” in their headlines on a regular basis.”
I missed that, apparently. What article was it attached to?
02/09/2009 at 21:36 A-Scale says:
One of the Wot articles. I can’t seem to find it, but it caused quite a lot of anger when it occurred. I’ll keep searching.
02/09/2009 at 21:37 Alec Meer says:
Can’t find it either. I fear Mr Scale’s either been at the industrial-strength cheese before bedtime or missed some irony somewhere along the line. The ‘Wot’ is cheerfully self-effacing towards ourselves, not towards gaming.
02/09/2009 at 21:42 Vinraith says:
Found it, I think he’s referring to Kieron’s comment here:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/02/19/wot-i-think-fear-2-project-origin/
“I’m off to bed, so I’ll explain the title tick: “What I Think” Implies fanaticism – the idea that What I think is worth a title and the capitals. “Wot I Think” in its schoolboy language undermines the importance of an individual opinion, making explicit the idea that this is just what some fucking idiot thinks about a game, and if you fill the coment thread with “It sounds more like a 6″isms, you deserve eye-rolling. Clearly it’s just an opinion. That’s why we called it a Wot I Think. You may as well get uptight over a Beano cartoon.
In other words, we’re mocking ourselves to make the underpinnings of the pieces clearer for everyone else. It’s a joke, but it’s totally serious. Same as every review, but we admit it.
Also, funny.
KG”
02/09/2009 at 21:43 Vinraith says:
A-Scale seems to feel that by undermining the importance of the reviewers opinion the RPS team is characterizing gaming itself as immature (rather than the opinion giver, which seems to be the intent). I’m not sure how he got that out of this, but perhaps he’ll enlighten us.
02/09/2009 at 21:45 Alec Meer says:
Nope, we can move on now, as it’s an entirely irrelevant tangent based on something the chap in question has banged his drum about a couple too many times in the past. In other words: back to MW2 now, goodly gentlefolk.
02/09/2009 at 21:46 Bhazor says:
Portal was far too short. I bought it for clever mind bending puzzles as promised in the trailers. Sure the game was funny and a romp but I wanted puzzles damn it. Instead we have a comedy tutorial which was fine for a budget price but I want the full price version with an extra forty standalone experiments of escalating cleverness and spectacle. If they pull the same shit with Portal 2 I’ll be very disappointed.
02/09/2009 at 21:47 Vinraith says:
Works for me.
Personally I’m just hoping MW2′s release finally drives MW1′s price down to the point where I can justify picking it up for the SP.
02/09/2009 at 21:48 Vinraith says:
That “works for me” was obviously directed at Alec, not Bhazor.
02/09/2009 at 21:53 Alec Meer says:
Deleted, non-warning-heeding men: take further ‘wot’ debate/misinterpretation to the forum. MW2 and specifically related topics only here.
02/09/2009 at 22:57 lumpi says:
Generally, I found that my above-average rage against the COD games is more of a general criticism of two trends in our super-serious medium of choice:
1) Movie-like presentation. COD4 might be the pinnacle of a trend for epic, movie-realistic presentation and plot, but it also reduced any actual gameplay to a supporting actor. The most memorable scenes are cut-scenes. There are entire missions (most of them), in which you do nothing but run forward and shoot where your nose is heading, in beautiful, scripted environments. It feels like a corridor shooter. There is no sense of space, of individual choice.
2) Quantity under quality. The extremist’s version of “quality over quantity”. Basically the notion, that a 20-30 hour game that entertains you for weeks isn’t possible. I could list, once again, a dozen examples for games that can prove this notion wrong. Instead I point to the 8 hours of work to model a single building in COD4, that you might see for a whopping 5 seconds in the finished game.
I, btw, don’t even give Valve a free pass on only supporting Portal as a 3-hour experimental game. The fact that there are enough ideas for a Portal 2 and that the simplistic design could have allowed longer, additional campaigns without an overly expensive army of art and programming guys, both shows that, if Valve trusted innovation a little more, they could have produced the first truly innovative feature-length FPS this year. In other words: Imagine Half-Life 1 was only released yesterday and only consisted of the “Surface Tension” chapter. Would anyone complain? No, because people seem to think nowadays, that it would have been impossible to turn this into a 20-hour game without filler (even excluding Xen, if you want).
And yes, yes… the multiplayer of COD4 is super-balanced and tactical. I get that. But I agree with a poster before, that it is made for and plays better on the 360. So there. It’s a different story though,…
02/09/2009 at 23:07 A-Scale says:
The night bombing mission is not a cutscene, and is perhaps the most memorable. As to free range, just how much free range do you think the average soldier has in a mission? This isn’t Fable or Oblivion and doesn’t want to be. It is a story that chronicles several intertwined tales about individual soldiers completing a rigidly structured mission. A corridor shooter is precisely what soldiering in populated areas is.
02/09/2009 at 23:17 Bhazor says:
Reply to A-Scale
The night mission has almost no fail state (except being repeatedly told “Don’t blow up the church”), theres little real consequence to your actions, you have no control on movement and fundamentally its no different to any other turret section except for a pair of neat visual filters.
02/09/2009 at 23:38 Funky Badger says:
its no different to any other turret section except for a pair of neat visual filters.
Apart from the atmosphere it generates, which is unlike any other turret sequence.
[I am incapable of understanding the concept of not insulting people-Ed]
02/09/2009 at 23:41 Radiant says:
This comment thread in summation.
“Cod4 is good”
“Not it isn’t”
“Yes it is”
“NO IT ISN’T”
“YES IT IS”
Like a fucking circle with this shit; let it go.
02/09/2009 at 23:59 Starky says:
you forgot something:
“Cod4 is good”
“Not it isn’t”
“Yes it is”
*snide and pointless comment from someone*
“NO IT ISN’T”
“YES IT IS”
*snide and pointless comment from someone*
There you go.
Aside from a bit of ad hominem here and there this has been a decent debate in parts about the qualities or lack of in CoD4. People with different opinions discussing and debating them on a comment section of a post about said game franchise, say it ain’t so!
03/09/2009 at 00:46 Moog says:
What ever yo do – do it on a PS3 – The annoying teens are not on it, no swearing just middle aged glass ceiling management from Hertz
03/09/2009 at 03:16 TheFanciestOfPants says:
Hey something on topic!
MW2 sure has some nice new guns to shoot mans with.
In all seriousness though, it’s an insta-buy for me, I’m still playing CoD4 MP. When the whiners come round, just calmly switch to your two-rifles-with-grenade-launcher or sonic boom-three-nade-martyrdom rig.
Clears them out pretty fast, OR makes for hilarious rage.
03/09/2009 at 03:41 Ybfelix says:
I think Visual Novel genre is quite profitable in Japan. People know what they would get. If a small name game takes the movie-with-gameplay-in-it route it would certainly take a lot less flak.
Also, why are people who are AGAINST Bob Kotick discussing the best strategy FOR Activision to profit (less price more sales vs the opposite)? If you truly wish his downfall, shouldn’t you let them do the unwise (in your opinion) and eeeevil price hike and hence ultimately less profit for CODMW2? If you hate a corporation for charging you more, but can’t legitimately criticize it for maxing profit legally, please don’t use this “it’s for you own good” pretense, just don’t buy the product.
03/09/2009 at 06:16 Sonic Goo says:
So… nobody noticed the numbers floating up from the enemies’ heads? I remember another thread here recently where it was the end of the world…
03/09/2009 at 09:10 bill says:
Variable prices for games seems like a good idea to me.
It seems dumb that games that cost $50million to make, and games thet cost $1million to make have to cost the same price. It’d open up the field more, and allow lower budget games a chance to compete with the big boys.
Right now budgets are through the roof, games have to break the top 10 to make a profit, and pc games prices are lower than 10 years ago. That’s just weird.
03/09/2009 at 09:15 Ansob. says:
Because the stupidity of people is such that it will take years for Activision to recognise that the price hike may have been a mistake. Meanwhile, those of us who actually like games, rather than buying into them because the Xbox 360 makes the frathouse cooler, will have to suffer from DRM and increased prices in order to buy our games legitimately.
03/09/2009 at 09:54 Xercies says:
@Bill
Its there mistake though that the budget costs $50 million, no one told them to spend that much on a game(you could argue that gamers tell them but that isn’t true either, who were the first ones to put extreme graphics on the cover for selling point: They were so there to blame if people want more extreme graphics not us) And anyway I actually don’t think the game does cost $50 million to make. Since with 3D art you reuse which means your not paying more for graphics your actually paying a bit less. For sequels the budget actually goes down for that very reason. And if the budget is bigger tis usually for advertising reseons which technically isn’t sopending more on the game.
03/09/2009 at 12:06 MrRud says:
To me, Kotic wants only to secure his CEO bonuses for the fiscal year, hence Starcraft II post-poned to the next fiscal year, so activision can make a s*it ton of money for 2 years in a row and his CEO can get not one but TWO giant checks.
03/09/2009 at 12:32 DMJ says:
If MW2 is “CoD4 – But It Is New Again” then I’ll buy it.
CoD4 was my standout adrenaline experience of that year so it’s a guaranteed sale.
Not at the enormo-price though. If it reaches standard price I’ll buy it in a heartbeat.
With a movie, say, Titanic, the price I pay to watch it is not proportional to the cost of production and marketing. Why should the games industry be any different? Or should we perhaps look forward to Transformers 3 being £20 a ticket in the cinema?
03/09/2009 at 19:23 Radiant says:
@starky but its all the time with this same “is it good?” debate.
End result?
Some like it some don’t.
You’re not going to convince either to suddenly change their mind.