Guess part of the negative feedback D3 received was people thinking "why the hell did that take 10 years to make?? It's just an ordinary game - didn't you promise me the next big thing?!"Originally Posted by mashakos
I liked the game's narration and skill system. But that was only iteration done right.
Btw: nice keynotes!
I do because I worked in that shit, and as such I say you're full of the afore-mentioned.
The Republican establishment, however much you wish to deny reality, has never, ever done step one for education. They like their electorate dumb and malleable. Take your trickle-down bullshit and jump off a bridge.
There are concept cars that can drive themselves in the Nevada desert on a clear day with a guy on the wheel just in case. After 80 billion was spent on them. Suffice it to say, ain't gonna be some self-driving cars in Manhattan for a long while yet.
Manhattan topology should be easy compared to most citys that don't adhere to a rectangular grid. Well maybe it's a legal issue? Can't sue anyone if there's no driver. /jk
I'd appreciate if you could try to see the point I aim to illustrate with those exaggerated examples and not single them out as the weakest link and quote it to pull my argumentation appart! ;)
Last edited by lithander; 17-02-2013 at 09:21 PM.
This thing tethered my Xbox, the Kinect, is a fascinating bit of hardware. I've seen some incredibly innovative stuff done with it, but it's all individual programmers who got their hands on the SDK. On the Xbox the best stuff for Kinect are more like toys than games, if that distinction makes sense.
It's certainly possible to innovate, but nobody really wants to. It does come down to money. Perhaps game budgets are okay, but there's a correlation between budget and risk that greatly hinders innovation and originality.
The Kinect is an example where the potential for innovation is great, because there isn't much to copy. There could have been this explosion of experimental games, but instead it's a bunch of low budget toys. Perhaps it isn't possible to make a "great" game for Kinect, but no one is trying to even make an actual "game."
I'd love to see more risk by publishers and experimentation by developers, but I can't really blame them for the way it's been. Perhaps kickstarter is the Endowment for the Arts for games? There's potentially a lot more money available, certainly with strings attached, but I guess grants are pretty stringy themselves.
I do believe that you're not giving them enough credit, since Google's driverless car handles traffic surprisingly well already. We're still a long way off from being driven by software, that's true, but you can't deny that there's significant progress being made.
Otherwise, interesting thread, carry on.
For sure, there is progress being made, largely by people with more money than god and infinite free time. These are not exactly the sorts of parameters we expect of games developers.
No, it's contrary to the design. TES is all about exploring the world; the systems are heavily balanced towards motivating the player to keep heading over the horizon, not to spend a lot of time in any particular place. Adding more depth to the NPCs is somewhat pointless because you don't expect the player to hang around for long enough to bring it out. In addition, it detracts from the push to keep them exploring. It's not really a case of depth versus width, simply that the depth is elsewhere (in this case in the world as a character rather than the NPCs).
The entire point being they didn't break new ground, they simply took existing systems and blended them in a way that worked better than previous games. I can't see any ambition in the games mentioned, barring the ambition to make a good game anyway.But I never claimed that. I was talking about ambition. They were a lot bolder, dared to break new ground despite the risk of failure. Maybe because less money was at risk.
Money is a non-issue. Budgets were smaller, but at the same time income was also smaller. There's no appreciable difference between blowing ten thousand on development or ten million if it's the entirety of your annual income.
until people realize that Half Life is just <insert any of dozens of linear action/adventure console games> with a gun instead of a sword, you can't even begin to address potential
Half Life is too often compared to stuff like Quake... Quake-like games are sports that actually reach their potential pretty well
single player stuff is so primitive in comparison
when Half Life is considered a game-changer, no wonder the industry is focused on scripted sequences and graphics
sure, if you compare it to Quake's single player, it appeals to a different type of gamer. But Half Life compared to Zelda or another game that's actually in its genre? It hardly stands out besides the polish
I think I agree with you, biz. I enjoyed HL1 and HL2 was a lot of fun (though a bit of a let down because I was over-eager for it) but the original HL only did stuff that was new if you were looking at as a Quake-type of game, not comparing it to adventure style games. It's the perspective (in the game) that does that, obviously.
I did think HL2 at least pushed some envelopes with physics, and of course the toolset. It sure was a long time ago now...
Crysis certainly pushed potential forward, physics wise. It says something regarding this topic, I guess, that Crysis 1 had better and more physics than Crysis 2.
After reading the posts of the libertarians in this thread, even though I was aware of them, I must conclude that I've finally found a group of people dumber than establishment republicans.
that game sucks, MoLAoS
God has no money. Otherwise the churches would stop passing the pan around and holding shitty fundraisers. Oooohh, attacking religion, I'm such a goddamn hipster heretic.
Haha, "sports". Right. Just like cyber athletes, right? Quake as an MP game was an arena-style shooter focused on being ridiculously fast. "Sport" is a silly term to apply here.
This is true. Half Life basically popularised the scripted shooter, it cemented it as a popular thing to do. It's as linear as a line where you go from one sequence to the next (and no, "hub" style levels don't really make it non-linear since they have specific orders in which to accomplish things to advance). But it's still a great game and an example of good linear design. The sequences were great for the day and added to the atmosphere. The pacing for Half Life 2 was just about perfect (compared to CoD where it never friggin' stops!) while Half Life's pacing was fairly well done but dragged in a few places. I'd say Portal was probably their best effort - it never outstayed its welcome. Portal 2 by comparison dragged on a bit too long.
In a lot of ways, Kickstarter is even more regressive than the industry as a whole, as it relies almost entirely on the lowest common denominator for money, which basically means digging through your childhood so as to tug at your nostalgic heartstrings.
This is true so far, but the potential for KS to fund some more original/innovative titles is there. Hmmm... though the only examples I can think of that are popular are fueled by nostalgia. I think there are some (a very few) of these ambitious indie games (like Unwritten, for example) that would've died half-finished without the fundraiser. Of course it remains to be seen if games like this die unfinished even WITH the KS, but in some cases it could push an otherwise doomed project out the door.
What game? I'm confused.
Even things like Star Citizen and MAIA aren't really anything more than nostalgia farms. SC is super ambitious though compared to nearly any other game on KS.
This "nostalgia" nonsense is just lazy Establishment lies. The thought that things that used to be done but aren't done any more might be worth doing again need have nothing to do with nostalgia.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
I don't know, calling kicksarter projects "nostalgia farms" sounds a lot like you're saying that these types of games are obsolete, and are now being brought back only because people remember similar games fondly. I mean it's true that they are capitalizing on people's nostalgia, but I feel that there's a ton of value in Star Citizen, Project Eternity, Planetary Annihilation etc. well beyond mere nostalgia.
In other words the phrase "nostalgia farm", as truthful as it may sound, oversimplifies the kickstarter phenomenon IMO.
Speaking of Star Citizen, I never really understood why space sims became less popular over the years. I mean they're usually the most visually striking games, and the gameplay can be very deep and satisfying and feeds some very primal boyhood fantasies. It's the fucking SPACE and Star Wars and I'm just puzzled by the fact that this genre withered and almost died...
steam
http://dailycelluloid.blogspot.com/- where I write about movies.
I'm not just talking about the preponderance of platformers. With the advent of tablet gaming, platformers would have come back regardless. I'm talking about the purposeful remakes of Bullfrog games, the intentional use of pixelated graphics, and the endless references to the 90s.
I think lots of that is based around the richness (or lack thereof) of the genre. We've got all of this cultural history that really happened to draw from, as compared to a relatively thin body of media about a time that's purely fictional (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc). Short of game mechanics completely drenching lore/background and making it very much unimportant (EVE), it's very difficult to come up with a winning combination there that sticks.
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