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.
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@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.
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.
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.
@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.
“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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Video games are a serious topic and should never be taken lightly.
“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).
@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.
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.
“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.
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…
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.
Xercies: advertising works. For everything.
@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.
EA say that marketing cost x3 more than developping.
I love this video :-) for not reason at all, that the latest joke :-)
@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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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?
Damned lack of an edit function, delete “is something” from the second sentence of the second paragraph.
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.
“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.
You’ve rather put your own spin on things there, Mr Scale.
I was not the one who claimed that gaming was silly/immature, my dear sir.
@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.
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.
@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?
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.