[Rant] What's Wrong with Video Games These Days?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

I've played Gears of War and Gears of War 2 and they're pretty much clunkier Halos with more grit and personality that unfortunately got driven into the ground as internet memes by posters like Tails.

Sorry Brady, but you destroy pretty much any pretense that you know what you're talking about buy saying shit like that. Let's skip past the fact that Gears isn't an FPS and Halo is (something of an inherent difference), but pretty much the only things they really share are aliens and guns.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

But it's all just sequels. Sequels sequels sequels.

Again, I'm calling bullshit. Of the top 20 games of 2008 we voted for here at GFF six are entirely new IP. And that ignores some of the year's bigger new IP entries such as Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, indie IP such as World of Goo, Braid, Castle Crashers and the Pixel Junk games. And how about non-sequels like Patapon, The Club, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Sega Superstar Tennis, No More Heroes, Race Driver: GRID, Lost Odyssey, Dissidia, Frontlines: Fuel of War, End War, Haze, de Blob, Boom Blox, Audiosurf, The Last Guy, LostWinds, Too Human, Army of Two, Spore, The Bourne Conspiracy or even Wii Fit. So yeah, what was that about it being all sequels?

Then there's the pure fact that sharing an base IP doesn't make a game a generic sequel. If you need proof of that just take a look at Burnout Paradise, which plays to the base values of the series but is actually pretty far removed from any of its forebears. And what about Far Cry 2 that you mention, which is only a sequel in as much as it has the name (seeing as how it was a new team, new engine, new gameplay mechanics, etc, etc). I could name more, but I think you get the idea.

Originally Posted by Skexis

Personally, I tend towards the expectation that anything can be good if someone is given enough time to work on it.

Definitely a worthwhile position to take and one I try to take.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

Sorry Brady, but you destroy pretty much any pretense that you know what you're talking about buy saying shit like that. Let's skip past the fact that Gears isn't an FPS and Halo is (something of an inherent difference), but pretty much the only things they really share are aliens and guns.


Again, I'm calling bullshit. Of the top 20 games of 2008 we voted for here at GFF six are entirely new IP. And that ignores some of the year's bigger new IP entries such as Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, indie IP such as World of Goo, Braid, Castle Crashers and the Pixel Junk games. And how about non-sequels like Patapon, The Club, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Sega Superstar Tennis, No More Heroes, Race Driver: GRID, Lost Odyssey, Dissidia, Frontlines: Fuel of War, End War, Haze, de Blob, Boom Blox, Audiosurf, The Last Guy, LostWinds, Too Human, Army of Two, Spore, The Bourne Conspiracy or even Wii Fit. So yeah, what was that about it being all sequels?

Then there's the pure fact that sharing an base IP doesn't make a game a generic sequel. If you need proof of that just take a look at Burnout Paradise, which plays to the base values of the series but is actually pretty far removed from any of its forebears. And what about Far Cry 2 that you mention, which is only a sequel in as much as it has the name (seeing as how it was a new team, new engine, new gameplay mechanics, etc, etc). I could name more, but I think you get the idea.


Definitely a worthwhile position to take and one I try to take.

Yes, yes, yes. All fine and good. But you miss the point of what is actually wrong with video games, OP.

And that is obvious: Only one of them is narrated by Stephen Fry.



And that's not nearly enough.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Denicalis

Yes, yes, yes. All fine and good. But you miss the point of what is actually wrong with video games, OP.

And that is obvious: Only one of them is narrated by Stephen Fry.



And that's not nearly enough.

Deni, you're close but not quite there. There is a three-pronged approach to making video games good again.

At least one but preferrably all three of the following:

Patrick Stewart
Samuel L Jackson
Christian Byrd

should be in every video game ever.

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

Spoiler:

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Patrick Stewart did his best, but it didn't quite save Oblivion.

I would suggest since Norio Wakamoto makes anything awesome, he'd naturally make more games awesome as well, just look at Crysis.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

Duke Nukem Forever is so going to be the best game ever.

Did you have something to contribute or are you going to busy yourself with a strawman?

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Skexis

It's my belief that because gaming has become more popular, it has become more industrial.

I never really thought too deeply about this aspect of development. I know that things were cut from Street Fighter IV as well as King of Fighters XII because of lack of time due to the need to meet a projected release date. I don't quite know how I feel about the time limits set on production. Especially since you make a good point about how players feel in regard to a game that's spent too long in the development cycle.

I liked Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix (go figure) for the fact that even though it hit a massive delay due to a problem with redrawing the sprites, Sirlin managed to keep folks interested by talking about rebalanced mode and such. I know that having a transparent development doesn't always help with keeping folks' attention, though. The subject just makes me curious as far as what games have suffered greatly for limited development time.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

The subject just makes me curious as far as what games have suffered greatly for limited development time.

Mass Effect, both KOTORs, Fable, Little Big Planet (Which without the patch was broken as fuck) and Gears of War 2 (Equally broken without a patch) spring immediately to mind and that's without actually giving it any thought. Admittedly the prevalence of online access for consoles means that developers can at least fix bugs post release but without that capacity, and for anyone playing without internet access, these are essentially broken games. It's a worrying trend in console gaming, this releasing of games that don't work properly then patching them and symptomatic of the pressure to meet release dates. Rockstar were seen as brave or even foolish for delaying GTAIV to April rather than rushing it out for the previous Christmas but luckily they held off, a decision probably made easier by the knowledge it was inevitably going to be one of the best selling games ever, whenever they released it.

As OP pointed out, there were a fucking ton of great games that weren't sequels last year. Of my whole 360 collection, the only games with numbers in the title are GTA IV, Halo 3, Fallout 3, Rainbow Six V2 and the Guitar Heroes. A lot of the games I spent most of last year playing, Too Human, Frontlines, Last Remnant and Crackdown for example were original IP's and all quite different from other games in their respective genres. Those game I have which are sequels are generally considered to be some of the best games released in recent times. GTAIV brought a whole new level of believability to the city and although the basic gameplay was much the same as the previous few titles, the attention to detail was unprecedented and they create such a distinctive world with each of their releases that, assuming you like that kind of game, each seems quite different, despite them all being basically the same.

Halo 3 on the face of it is just like Halo 2 and the first one but to anyone who's spent even a brief amount of time playing them, the differences are clear. Halo is all about the multiplayer and Bungie have worked to refine this, balancing the weapons, adding equipment and designing levels that work well with the gametypes that are popular. Sure, it's a game designed for fans of the series and hardly breaks new ground but in a series as hugely popular as Halo, I fail to see why this is a bad thing. If you were a developer of a series that had an installed fan base millions strong and rather than tweaking and improving your system, you released something completely different in an attempt to appeal to a different audience, I'd call you a fucking idiot and all your investors would ask for their money back.

Rainbow is "Just like all the other Tom Clancy games" insofar as it features pseudo-realistic squad combat and again, it's not a huge departure from previous games in the series in terms of plot or setting but the innovative cover system makes it a completely different game to what's come before. A game that used to be all about spotting the bad guys before they saw you and killing them quickly has become a game all about managing fields of fire, whether alone and ordering around your team mates or as a group online. The addition of increasingly "clever" AI has made the difference between the older Ghost Recon games where the terrorists would run around a corner blindly into a hail of machine gun fire and Rainbow Vegas 2 where you can easily be flanked and have your whole squad wiped out by one dude with a shotgun. It's a massive difference but one you'd only notice if you'd played both games.

To accuse Halo and Rainbow of being the same thing is beyond ridiculous. Halo is all about wading your lone soldier into hordes of enemies, actively dodging attacks, constantly moving and jumping and calculating how much incoming fire your shield will take up before you die and as such, whether to charge in or hold back. Rainbow is all about working out how to get the angle on the defenders, to take them out without exposing yourself to their fire, one bullet of which is normally fatal (If you're playing it properly on the hardest setting). They're quite different online too with Halo being essentially one big deathmatch, even in the team games where nobody really plays tactics and even so, the best tactic is always kill as many people as possible whereas Rainbow is a game primarily played co-op, either working through the campaign or playing terrorist hunts where cooperation is essential and running off on your own just results in you being dead very quickly.

Now as you all know, I'm not the world's biggest jrpg fan and to me, most of them are pretty interchangable but there's plenty of people here who'll tell me that Mother 3 is nothing at all like Persona 4 or Lost Odessey or whatever. My self confessed lack of interest means I view them all as pretty interchangable but that doesn't mean I don't see their worth in the eyes of people who play them. A lot of people enjoy linear games like those and as such, of course companies will keep making them to meet demand. I don't really see how that affects my own game playing.

Of course, I'm lucky in that according to you lot, I'm a pretty "average" gamer. I'm a few years above Brady's demographic but I'm white, male, smoke a bit of pot and enjoy gaming as a form of escapism from my boring job. I have no problem with buying sequels for games I enjoy as in my opinion, they allow me to extend the enjoyment I got from the original. Much as I enjoyed the first Halo, after a while I knew where every single bad guy was going to spawn from, the campaign had grown stale as a result. Halo 2 mostly kept the system, tweaked it a bit and added a new set of enemies in different places, essentially extending the lifespan of the game I already enjoyed.

That's not to say I won't embrace new ideas. I'm probably one of the more vocal supporters of Too Human and Last Remnant here, both brand new games and systems. I'm looking forward to Too Human 2 as I enjoyed playing the first one and would like to play a game using the same system but with some new challenges. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing?

All those of you complaining about games all being identikit, can you explain what exactly it is you are looking for in a game? There's lots of calls for innovation and less recycling but nobody has any suggestions it seems. It's like you're complaining for the sake of it. I find this especially amusing in the light of a few people here posting and implying that they are abnormal gamers and in fact, somehow above normal gamers, like your playing of games is somehow a higher calling or more worthy than mine, simply because I like games that are widely popular. Looking down on people for buying into something popular doesn't make you superior, it makes you weird, a bit sad and ultimately, in line for a lifetime of disappointment. I'm not denying your right to moan about not being catered for by the games development community but until you come to realise that this is a commercial industry and not an art form and that snobbery and commercialism just don't go hand in hand I fear you'll never be happy as gamers.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Shin

I enjoyed playing the first one and would like to play a game using the same system but with some new challenges. Can someone explain why this is a bad thing?

It's not at all. I, like yourself, am more than happy to see sequels to games I enjoyed, and I'm especially happy to see sequels to games where they really push to expand upon the previous titles. This is exactly why I'm highly anticpating Street Fight IV, Professor Layton 2, Call of Duty: MW2 and am hoping for a Crackdown 2. The only time I find issue with sequels is when you get people churning out lazy sequels that don't even try to mix up the challenges or gameplay, or titles like sports games that have done little more than change the team line-ups.

Lazy rip-offs are valid things to be annoyed about, and that's the issue I have with Call of Duty: World at War: Treyarch haven't tried anything new, they've taken the systems proven to work in Call of Duty 4 and copied them as closely as they could manage. When you're playing the same game again with a different skin, that is taking the piss. However, to call Gears 2, Crackdown, Halo 3 et al. lazy rip-offs or money spinners is not only insulting to the developers, but to people's own intelligence.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Whilst I agree to some extent, if one views games like that as expansion packs rather than new games, their validity increases. One of the best selling titles last year was that World of Warcraft expansion and as far as I'm aware, that changed the skills around a bit (Akin to a new weapon set in CoDWaW), let you add a few levels to your character and stuck in a big old new area to wander around. That could be a bad example, I've played neither the original nor the expansion so there could be a lot more to it than that but the premis is basically that people enjoy interacting with a game world and an expansion of this kind allows them to continue to do so in a fresh setting. One could argue that charging full price for a game that is little more than an expansion is cheeky but if the consumers weren't willing to pay that much, they wouldn't charge that much.

Even in the case of sports game updates, they do add new features and controls and tweak the AI so it's not exactly just a roster change but even then, if people are willing to fork out for a new Fifa every 9 months then more fool them. Some people just buy one every two or three years when they feel there's been sufficient upgrading to warrant a new purchase and at the end of the day, the sales figures speak for themselves. If these things didn't pay for themselves they wouldn't get made. The development costs involved in updating the rosters in Fifa probably aren't very high so EA get a load of cash from the franchise. This at least gives them the option to be a bit more daring with some of their other releases whilst still keeping the shareholders happy. Whilst you might not agree with the practice, nobody is making you buy EA sports games and the money from people who do is paying for the new Syndicate game or Mass Effect 2 or Lord of the Rings Conquest or the next Burnout or another Left 4 Dead or whatever else, you see?

How ya doing, buddy?

Oh no, I agree, I'm talking about lazy sequels from the point of view of a gamer who wants more from those experiences. I understand their necessity, to an extent, as a business practice. Doesn't mean I have to respect the games it produces (though it would be fair to say people like EA and EA Sports have been improved with how much they put into their yearly releases as compared to a few years ago).

But yeah, if I don't think a game is worth what they're asking for it, you can bet your ass I won't be buying it.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

Oh no, I agree, I'm talking about lazy sequels from the point of view of a gamer who wants more from those experiences.

Fair enough although again, the ambiguity of the titles works in your favour here. Take the new CoD as an example. Most people bought it because they liked the last one and perhaps it failed in that respect as I've heard people say it's a step backwards but then, the internet being what it is, these opinions were freely available within days of the game's release. If you were a fan of the last CoD, you could have read a few customer reviews (Because seriously, who listens to trade reviews any more) and seen that criticism then possibly waited for the price to fall a bit before you bought it. Perhaps you pre-ordered it because of some pre-order bonus but then you're just a sucker for the marketing, the reason they offer pre-order freebies is precisely so everyone will get the game on day one, at full price and before they've had a chance to be put off by negative comments.

You might also have got it early because you wanted to play it online when the community was at it's biggest. It's certainly true that the number of people playing any given game online drops off pretty sharply after a month or so but personally I find the people still playing after that month are more likely to be fun to play with as they're the ones who really enjoy the game. There's probably no more tha a couple of thousand people playing Frontlines online any more but none of them scream into the mic or run round team killing or any of that other shit.

If you were thinking of getting the new CoD because you like WW2 shooters, rather than necessarily the CoD engine, thanks to the surfeit of such games you won't have to wait long for another one to come along and with any luck, whoever makes it will have learned from Treyarch's mistakes and made a better game, you benefit in the long run.

Even if you don't realise it, there is a fairly complex economic decision gong on every time you buy a game. You're weighing up whether the additional cost and risk of buying on day one is worth the bigger online community and free tat you get for pre-ordering and of course, whether it's too much to pay to not have to wait a couple of weeks for the second hand copies to hit the shops.

Games are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. A combination of a lack of personal time to play them and wanting a bargain means I rarely pick things up on day one anymore, instead I wait a couple of weeks and buy a used copy for cheaper. I often play demos first or read peer reviews so I know what the game's actually like rather than buying into the hype but that's my decision.

The problem is perhaps that people are so easily swayed by advertising and hype that they'll rush into things these days. The promise of some Halo 3 levels and an in game flaming Warthog has probably increased pre-orders of Halo Wars by a few thousand, with people not wanting to miss these limited (And yet largely pointless) offers, at the cost of waiting to see if the game's actually any good.

I'm getting slightly off-topic here but I guess my point is that the problem with games these days is that the end users, the gamers are too easily swayed by cheap offers and advertising gimics and as such, developers can hide a sub-standard product behind a raft of pre-order bonuses. The advertising department is now as important as the development team.

In the same way that a democratic country gets the government it deserves, I feel that the gameplaying community gets the games it deserves and whilst people continue to get feverish over day one purchases, developers will continue to cut corners to meet deadlines and save money. Essentially I think if people would take more time to consider their purchases they might be disappointed less often.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Denicalis

You guys need to stop acting like if there's a lot of flash, there can't be substance.

So very true. The flashy aspects of a game are irrelevant to the substance. The two aren't related in any way. I've played flashy games this generation that had a ton of substance. I've also played flashy games this (and previous) generation which were as shallow as a coat of paint. It can go either way. It isn't like there's a slider bar that can go to either end of a flash/substance scale.

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You're also using revisionist history. Every system had this happen. There were a handful of quality titles, and then a whole lot of filler.

This is what I came into the thread to say. I'm not a young gamer, and I've got a long perspective on games as a form of entertainment. I'm finding just as many quality games to buy as I ever did. I'm also finding just as much trash to ignore as I ever did. Sure the DS and the Wii are full of shovelware, but wasn't that also true of the SNES and the PS1? It happens to popular consoles.

Although I'm not really a fan of FPS games, I have to say a few words in defense of the genre. It happens throughout gaming history that the most popular genre attracts a lot of games which may appear to the casual observer to be very similar. Right now FPS are extremely popular, and it may well be the case that the differences between them are only visible to those who take an interest in the genre, but much the same could be said of RPGs. The FPS fan sees the vast array of RPGs on the Playstation series of consoles and wonders what exactly is the difference (other than story) between all these games involving turn-based battles.

When platform games were popular, the SNES and Genesis were positively flooded with titles. It just happens to whatever genre is the most popular at the time. It doesn't mean that the various games are all the same, it just means that most of them are aimed at the enthusiast, and the differences may not be readily apparent.

As for the question of gaming stories... I have to admit that games will never rival film and television, much less great literature. I generally view the story in a game, even in an RPG, as an interesting way of presenting the player with motive and objectives, rather than purely as a narrative. It is nice if the story is well presented and coherent, but I don't expect as much from it as I would from any typical TV show.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

Sorry Brady, but you destroy pretty much any pretense that you know what you're talking about buy saying shit like that. Let's skip past the fact that Gears isn't an FPS and Halo is (something of an inherent difference), but pretty much the only things they really share are aliens and guns.

Ok, so Gears is a third person shooter. I've still played the game and god forbid I lump it into the same genre that has everything else except a cover system. You'd go into a conniption if I called Dead Space an FPS, even though I'm playing it right now. I really don't give a fuck.

Saying that Gears and Halo only share aliens and guns ignores all the other themes they share. Badass space marines killing waves of aliens in exotic locales. What differentiates Gears from Halo is the cover system and an environment caked over in 36 flavors of mud and grit. The game was designed to appeal to the Halo crowd, and the fact that there's such a huge overlap speaks to that. Being a shooter in the spirit of Halo isn't a knock on the game. My main complaint was that everything compelling about the game is ruined by the people that play it.

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Again, I'm calling bullshit. Of the top 20 games of 2008 we voted for here at GFF six are entirely new IP. And that ignores some of the year's bigger new IP entries such as Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, indie IP such as World of Goo, Braid, Castle Crashers and the Pixel Junk games. And how about non-sequels like Patapon, The Club, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Sega Superstar Tennis, No More Heroes, Race Driver: GRID, Lost Odyssey, Dissidia, Frontlines: Fuel of War, End War, Haze, de Blob, Boom Blox, Audiosurf, The Last Guy, LostWinds, Too Human, Army of Two, Spore, The Bourne Conspiracy or even Wii Fit. So yeah, what was that about it being all sequels?

You just listed off a lot of derivative games and movie tie-ins. Too Human, a God of War clone, Star Wars: Force Unleashed, an extreme version of the Jedi series, Haze, a Halo clone. Not many of the games you even listed are very good, which is kind of why this thread exists in the first place. And a lot of the ones that are good are 10 bux on Steam or Xbox Live. But if you were paying attention you'd notice that I'm not talking about Indie titles, I'm talking about AAA releases.

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Then there's the pure fact that sharing an base IP doesn't make a game a generic sequel. If you need proof of that just take a look at Burnout Paradise, which plays to the base values of the series but is actually pretty far removed from any of its forebears. And what about Far Cry 2 that you mention, which is only a sequel in as much as it has the name (seeing as how it was a new team, new engine, new gameplay mechanics, etc, etc). I could name more, but I think you get the idea.

Far Cry 2 is a piece of shit.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

Saying that Gears and Halo only share aliens and guns ignores all the other themes they share. Badass space marines killing waves of aliens in exotic locales. What differentiates Gears from Halo is the cover system and an environment caked over in 36 flavors of mud and grit. The game was designed to appeal to the Halo crowd, and the fact that there's such a huge overlap speaks to that. Being a shooter in the spirit of Halo isn't a knock on the game. My main complaint was that everything compelling about the game is ruined by the people that play it.

Man, where to even begin. They share a theme, that's just about it. The two are about as far removed from each other gameplay wise as day and night, proof you haven't spent enough time on either title.

Halo focuses on long range and vehicular combat as opposed to Gears' close range shotgun fests. That's it at its most simple, but really?

The vehicles for one are a huge standout. Gears has maybe all of, two vehicle sequences in the game? And that's in a tank. Halo has a large number of missions/sequences played in the games large array of vehicles, not to mention fliers like the Banshee. None of that exists in Gears. The MP in Gears features guns. The MP in Halo relies upon a variety of weapon tactics, vehicle usage, and teamwork on a larger scale.

Where is Gears' equivalent to the Spartan laser? The brute hammer? The energy sword? Active camo? Overshield? Not to mention the ability alone to jump, the man cannons, the significantly larger maps both online and offline? The game types?

Anybody that's spent a decent amount of time playing both games know they're two different things in their entirety. Hell, even the campaign in Halo focuses more on large scale battles and field tactics where as Gears' has always been about small stop and pop/adrenaline rush affairs.

They aren't even close to the same thing. The only part you have right on this is that they both are about shooting aliens with guns. Once you get past that it's a whole different ball game. I'm not even going to comment on the game being a "meme" because I play it thoroughly (my stats will attest to this) and enjoy it. That's just ridiculous and makes zero sense.

Oh, and calling all the titles Omagnus listed as not good? Ahaha, just how many of those have you played?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Enough to know that not all of them are very good. You don't have to play Big Mutha Truckers to know it's not that great either from things like gameplay videos and word of mouth.

I certainly know a lot of them aren't worth paying 60 bucks.

Gears probably would not exist if it weren't for Halo. I don't need to go through all the differences in Frontline: Fuel of War to explain why it wouldn't exist without Battlefield.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

Enough to know that not all of them are very good. You don't have to play Big Mutha Truckers to know it's not that great either from things like gameplay videos and word of mouth.

I certainly know a lot of them aren't worth paying 60 bucks.

Gears probably would not exist if it weren't for Halo. I don't need to go through all the differences in Frontline: Fuel of War to explain why it wouldn't exist without Battlefield.

All of those games weren't 60 bucks. A few were arcade titles like Castle Crashers and Braid ($10 or so), stuff like Patapon was $20, SST retailed for $40, and I'm pretty sure NMH was less than full. I'll go back and check the rest but not right now.

Also just because one wouldn't exist without the other doesn't mean they're the same thing. Not that I agree with you on that point at all but you're more or less ignoring the huge differences between the two.

That and I doubt the game was made to appeal to the Halo crowd. Most of the fanbase of Halo abhors GoW for being shotty roadie run bullshit while the Gears fanbase hates Halo for being a Sniper/Battle Rifle snooze fest. There are obviously people who enjoy both, but you know. It's a huge testament to the fact that they both have their own unique play styles and are separate games.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

You just listed off a lot of derivative games and movie tie-ins.

Of the 27 games I named a grand total of two are movie tie-ins (one being somewhat dubious since there's no movie that covers The Force Unleashed). Now, if you'd like to give non-retarded examples of how the rest are derivative I'll be waiting.

For example, not ever FPS is a Halo clone. I know this is clearly difficult for you to grasp, as boy all those games feature guns, but give it a try.

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But if you were paying attention you'd notice that I'm not talking about Indie titles, I'm talking about AAA releases.

Of course, the state of the games industry only takes into account AAA titles. What was I thinking.

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Far Cry 2 is a piece of shit.

Entirely not the point of why I was bring it up as an example, but whatever I guess, it's not like you're paying attention to the point.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

I don't need to go through all the differences in Frontline: Fuel of War to explain why it wouldn't exist without Battlefield.

Nobody would deny that Frontlines owes a lot to Battlefield and to the casual observer they're basically the same thing. Only anyone who's played both would tell you that when it came out, Frontlines improved on the previous Battlefield games in every possible way. Frontlines allowed for 25 a side battles (I'm comparing console games here) to Battlefield's 16, Frontlines had a single player campaign that was actually fun and worth playing as opposed to Battlefield 2's pointless effort that nobody ever bothered with. Frontlines had a really good balance of vehicles and infantry which worked equally well on the smaller battlefields and the fucking massive ones (Which were massive compared to Battlefield) rather than Battlefield's Helicopter+Tanks=win formula. The balance in Frontlines meant squad cooperation is damn near essential to succeed whereas Battlefield caters for lone-wolf tactics, essentially making it a deathmatch game. Frontlines keeps the combat close by shifting the current objective to where the action is rather than allowing you to skirt roudn the battlefield and pick up the unguarded one at the back. The list of ways in which Frontlines is superior to the previous Battlefield game on 360 is almost endless and as such, why does it matter than it draws a lot from it's predecessor?

From your point of argument, it looks like you're saying that once a game of a certain type has been made, companies should never again make a similar game. That improving on a concept is verboten and all new games must be entirely original ideas and frankly, that's just stupid.

By that logic there would have been no Fallout 2, no Suikoden 2, no Quake (Which was basically Doom, which was a dressed up Wolfenstein), no Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Starcraft, Warcraft or any other RTS after Dune 2, no Galaga (Which is a tarted up Space Invaders after all) and so on and so on.

You simply can't criticise a game because it draws on another game for inspiration, especially when it's something like Frontlines which was made by Kaos Studios, the people who made Battlefield in the first place before Dice took over. Yes, as OP says, direct copies are lazy and pointless but then people very rarely buy direct copies. What people buy are games that are similar to game types they already enjoy but that develop the concept and move the genre forward. Of course there are completely original games from time to time, look at Loco Roco or Katamari for example but these are rarely massive sellers. People are creatures of habit and like the familiarity of a game that's similar to things they already played.

If we were talking about music, would you agree that GWAR are basically pointless because deep down they're just Slayer? (Or some equally silly comparisson, fucked if I actually know who GWAR sound like but I hope you see my point).

I was speaking idiomatically.

Wait, you console people used to play Battlefield with 16 person servers? That's too small even for a decent match of TF2.

Originally Posted by Skexis

Did you have something to contribute or are you going to busy yourself with a strawman?

I just wanted to point out that time in development doesn't necessarily make a game any better. I mean, if you want another example, try Daikatana as one which was released, but probably shouldn't have been.

I don't think anyone will fault Blizzard for their continual late releases since all of their games that are released late are absolutely top notch and have benefited from the extra polishing they give to it.

But take my favorite game at the moment, TF2. Do you really think it takes as long as they're waiting between patches to create the new content, or do you think they're just dragging their feet for no good reason?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

32 man servers, 16 a side but yeah, over a whole map it can get a little lonely, hence why Frontlines upping it to 50 plus the frontline concept meaning only the objectives currently on the frontline are capturable makes for so much better gameplay as all 50 people are generally focused in a smaller area rather than wandering all over the map looking to sneak a capture of an unguarded map at the back (Or spawn camping which to be fair, does happen in Frontlines, especially with the auto-sentrys but a camera switch as you die to show who killed you plus a 5 second spawn invulnerability and the choice to spawn by your squadmates rather than at a base cut that right down). I think the Battlefield maps were slightly smaller on the console versions too.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

But take my favorite game at the moment, TF2. Do you really think it takes as long as they're waiting between patches to create the new content, or do you think they're just dragging their feet for no good reason?

With Valve? I'd say yes, truthfully. Depending on how many people they have actively working on it, they do a lot of playtesting and balancing before anything sees the light of day.

It doesn't hurt that the staggered releases help keep interest levels high in the game and produce good word of mouth, but I don't think they squander the time that they're given, by any means.

Valve happens to be the exception to the rule in the gaming industry right now, however. They are running counter to a lot of business models that other companies hold dear, and fortunately for us it seems to be working well.

I don't think longer=better, which is why I responded the way I did. But the tendency is to push the deadline aspect of it, and put the product out in a functional state, instead of trying to see that it reaches its original vision. It's a disappointing fact of the industry, but it's also sometimes with good reason. Vanguard was doomed to failure from the start, if the behind-the-scenes stuff about the main producer being a paranoid drug addict are to be believed. But they salvaged something out of it to make a product that was, if substandard, at least playable. (As opposed to nothing at all)

My point is that there's a threshold. When you involve enough people who don't share the original spark that started the project in the first place (or if no one cares about the project they're working on other than to get a paycheck), you get poorly made games. So, in other words, trying to say that there's too many games of this genre or that this kind of gamer is ruining everyone else's fun, or even that games X years ago had it all figured out is not seeing the bigger picture.

They didn't have it all figured out, there just weren't as many people breathing down their neck about it. Gaming wasn't a cash cow (at least not as big of one) as it is today.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?