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"The gaming industry unimaginative, and trivial due to games like BlackOps" says dev
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Ya, I mean a financial failure. It needs to pay off the development costs and management costs for the publisher and come out ahead. You see EA and such making XBLA games because the costs are low enough that a 50k sales will cover everything.
You can't make a BLOPS scale (in cost and development size) version of Minecraft. People won't be willing to 'try' it for $60. So 10 euro works out.
Just another reason for why retail games should have a whole spectrum of prices at release. Alan Wake, if sold for $40 would have been picked up more readily. Instead, people skip it for Red Dead Redemption (not a bad choice) and never look at Alan Wake until they see it for sale for $20 on Amazon.
If the decision was $40 for Alan Wake or $60 for Red Dead Redemption, I think both games would have gotten nice sales figures.
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Yep. I said the same exact thing when Mirror's Edge and PoP '08 came out. Good games, but not a great proposition at 60 bucks.
But art that's good ART doesn't necessarily need to be a good game, either. It's just a lot harder to do, and I can't think of too many examples off the top of my head (Silent Hill 2 maybe?).
It's generally in trying to straddle both qualities that most games end up falling short. While making a great game that's also great art is possible, true examples are very few and far between.
I think the gaming industry in general would be better served if developers stuck to their fundamental goals in a game. By that I mean, if a developer isn't concerned with the plot of a game, they shouldn't have to feel as if they need to shoehorn some dramatic structure in just because it's what has settled into the collective consciousness as 'what you do.' If you throw a half-assed, poorly written story into an otherwise great experience, it takes away from it, not adds.
Imagine if, in God of War, every boss fight we had to sit through a couple minutes of cinematics where we were forced to watch Kratos and some feminine love interest engage in poorly written romance.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Alternatively, it seems that a lot could be solved in the industry with an adherence to the simple rule that if you deploved a game MAKE IT WITHOUT ANY PROBLES.
PSN:RevDrGalactus/NN:RevDrGalactus/Steam
this is true, but i'm not sure i would like all games to go completely minimalist with their story. i still liked GTA4's story, despite the amount of scripting it had.
To me the City setting, with all its faults and fidelity, was the story; moreso than Niko's gang drug money problems.
Scripted sequences was probably the wrong word (since games run on scripts) . I meant intrusive writing or dialogue directed at the player to convey events, like in a cutscene where something random downs your chopper or you are told to go to this oddly vital location.
I agree that today gaming is often the convergence of sport and story-telling, but I disagree that you can't separate the two and still have worthwhile games. Interactive fiction and adventure games are not a matter of skill, purely one of story. Certainly not stories crafted in the traditional fashion, but stories none the less. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have games of pure skill, where story is either completely omitted or utterly irrelevant.
In between the two extremes, those two elements are combined infinitely varying ratios. My point is that a game cannot be judged just on how much of each it tries to include. Something that's more story than sport is not intrinsically better than something that's nearly all sport, or entirely story.
edit: and those aren't even the only elements that exist in gaming. More and more, gaming is becoming about showing you something new just visually. Things like Mirror's Edge or Zeno Clash, where the aesthetic is just as important as story or skill (if not, more so).
You make a good case. Maybe I'm defining both ends of the spectrum too narrowly, though -- skill (of the sporting variety) may not exactly be what you're using in an interactive story, but you are still calling upon some sort of personal resource to make your decisions. Likewise, a game that has no story, setting, or anything apart from abstract visual feedback, is definitely not calling upon the dramatic tradition at all, but it still can't happen without some kind of creative decisions from its author.
Mirror's Edge is one of those games that is fascinating to me because of how much it is and isn't about its story. The actual narrative, and the way it's delivered, is incredibly clumsy and borders on trite -- yet somehow, the world the story takes place in, conveyed by every minute you spend in a freshly-painted hallway or leaping across sunny rooftops, feels unforgetabbly alive and vibrant.
PSN:RevDrGalactus/NN:RevDrGalactus/Steam
What.
Complexity exponentially increases the amount of time needed to tame it.
The more complex games gets, the harder it is to deviate from known/unimaginative implementations.
I think game developers are already working as hard as they can.
For instance, if you wanted to make a 3d game engine with molecule-based models instead of polygons, then you'd pretty much have to write your own directX instructions to load and display them. And directX started out when?
We all want creative and impressive games, but it's not even a commercial issue, its a building-a-submarine-when-all-you-have-are-lamborghinis sort of problem.
That was exactly how I felt about Mirror's Edge. It definitely had a story, and had a pretty big focus on skill and timing, but in the end it was just what the world looked and felt like that really stuck with me and kept me coming back to it.
Looks 100% fake
That'd be a lot of effort for a fake.
Why do you have to kill [strike]our[/strike] his childlike innocence? Why?
Actually, I'd be happy enough if this was a goal video for something that was still pursing the goal. I don't need it to look this good, I just want the damn sequel.
But other than that, AAA titles are full of muddy textures and UE3's lack of good AA
well iunno man, Just Cause 2 is damnnnn pretty
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Oh yeah, forgot about that. For a typically console oriented company, Square Enix is doing a much better job with managing PC ports for it's developers than Edios ever did
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