And how do you tell that a person did or did not buy a game because of the protagonist? Maybe the game just wasn't good or had the appeal of another game and that's why it sold. Do they poll every gamer who decided to not buy it and they all said "hey if there was a male protagonist then I'd have bought the game"?
Molyneux's "work" has been in the "total garbage" zone for so long that I don't think I've ever even played a good Molyneux game. The first game I've played of his was Black & White, which was basically ass. Everything he's made since then has been a disappointment. Since that game started development in '97, that means he's made jack shit that's worthwhile in the last 15 years.
Black and White was ass? B-b-but IGN gave it a 9.7! It must be the best PC game ever made!
Fortunately, the kind of people who would actually pay into Kickstarter are the kind of people who know just how much of an ass Molyneux is. I don't think we have to worry too much about him getting millions through Kickstarter and pissing it all down the drain; stuff like Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, and Star Citizen are all projects made by real vets with reputations actually worth a damn and people know that. Those guys are all reviving things that were written off by publishers long ago despite obvious player interest, whereas the only thing Molyneux will be trying to revive is his ego.
I'm going to nit-pick this a tad. Those three Kickstarter wunderkind you listed? The only reason you're not potentially saying the same thing about Jordan Weisman (Shadowrun), Brian Fargo (Wasteland), and Chris Roberts (Star Citizen) that you are about Molyneux is that they haven't actually done anything in recent memory for you to judge them on.
Weisman's done very little (only one children's game, a book or two, and started a license holding company for FASA properties) since leaving Microsoft a decade ago. Brian Fargo's been the busiest of the three since Bard's Tale back in 2004 (which wasn't well received), and since has only been a leading dev on Hunted: The Demon's Forge (which was also not well received) and a Choplifter HD remake that I'd never even heard happened. Chris Roberts is probably the worst of the bunch, having been in essential retirement since 2001. You want to talk "reviving egos"? There's not much else more egotistical than asking for money for pet projects by trumpeting your glories of literal decades past while avoiding the question of "Well, what have you done for me lately?" I'm pulling for those three Kickstarter projects and desperately want them to succeed, but I'm also not going to go all goggle-eyed over Chris Roberts giving me an asspat and a smile and telling me that Star Citizen is going to be the bee's knees.
So yeah, I think the vitriol spewed at Molyneux should be toned down a bit, and I say that as someone who's been burned by him twice (Black & White - shame on him, Fable 1 - shame on me) and wisely learned to give his projects a wide berth.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Dungeon keeper was really good, isn't his next game going to be based on that gameplay?
GODUS draws on the cunning battle-psychology of Dungeon Keeper, the living, changing world of Black & White and the instinctive, satisfying gameplay of Populous.
So no, not really.
Anyway, Eurocom:
"We've fought to try and save as many jobs as possible, but the steep decline in demand for console games, culminating in a number of console projects falling through in the last week, left us with no option. Eurocom has retained a core staff of just under 50 employees and will be focusing mainly on mobile opportunities moving forward."
I imagine it had more to do with them not really making AAA games and non-AAA games going down the tubes instead of console games as a whole.
You know what? I like that response. It's not backpedaling, it's just saying "hey, he said these things and he's probably got a good reason for it, why don't you sites stop trying to drag attention to yourselves by turning it into console wars?".
0
AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
And how do you tell that a person did or did not buy a game because of the protagonist? Maybe the game just wasn't good or had the appeal of another game and that's why it sold. Do they poll every gamer who decided to not buy it and they all said "hey if there was a male protagonist then I'd have bought the game"?
Actually? Yes, they do. They do it during focus testing - ask someone if they'd play the game if the protagonist is female. I am sure some games with androgynous protagonists even present the game to the focus groups with a female lead on occasion, though that is more expensive.
This isn't a discussion about gaming in particular. It's about the cultural norms of sales. On a fundamental level in this country, we train people to pick up "male" and "female" markers that are carried with us through our entire lives. Gaming has a very long history of being male-marked, because shooting, violence, and electronics have all been male-marked for a much longer time. Attempts to change that have been very, very slow.
Want the best example of this? Samus Motherfucking Aran. In that game, it should not matter in any way what gender the protagonist is. After all, it's a small number of pixels in an orange and red blob on the screen (NES version). Yet the manual always referred to Samus as male in the US and i believe gender neutral in Japan. The reveal that Samus was a female blew people's minds. Here, all of a sudden, you have a female protagonist who can hold her own against the toughest male video game heroes at the time. Yet in the US, everyone tried to get Samus into her bikini, and in Japan Metroid was one of the poorest selling games in Nintendo's stable. Then continue that through the rest of the series - For every move to make Samus more badass and independent, some setback appeared - Super Metroid introduced the zero suit and getting to see (the now blonde haired) Samus in skintight clothing - and further depictions built on that. In Fusion and Other M (which I've only heard commented on), you have her move a bit more towards the typical Japanese female stereotype, likely to help the games sell better in Japan. About the only universally positive depiction of Samus is the Prime games, where she is for the most part mute.
Here's the thing. There's a few stereotypes that our culture allows for females (which, thankfully, are expanding). Video game characters are allowed into a subset of those - Damsel in Distress, cold hardass bitch, flirtatious eye candy, emotional torrent. Those are the four I most often see depicted. Even if there is a character arc involved and the character gets to be three dimensional (which happens less and less anymore), you'll see those stereotypes get hit on. About the only exceptions I can think of are RPGs - either because they actually need to populate a world, or alternatively because they've already designed the male half of the game and the female gender choice needs to have parity or people will bitch -- like they did with Mass Effect and the sex options.
Companies are going to do what sells. And in our culture, the vast majority of males aren't ready to project themselves as a female unless they get eye candy out of it (such as guys playing women in MMOs because they have to stare at their characters' asses for so long). Therefore, games where you are female aren't going to sell as well.. Or so their logic goes. Very few companies have actually given it a shot to see if it works or not; instead they just follow conventional wisdom.
Luckily, conventional wisdom's going to cause the industry great pain if things don't change in the next few years.
If the CPU doesn't fit the needs of the game it's fine to point it out. If anyone gets defensive about that, that's silly. The guy who made the comment clearly could have and should have put it better, but whatever, he's not a spokesperson by career. Just some guy frustrated about something.
The length of the official THQ response seems unnecessary. Should've just been, "One of our guys mouthed off and is frustrated. The end."
(such as guys playing women in MMOs because they have to stare at their characters' asses for so long)
I just want to chime in and admit that when I first started picking female avatars, I did it mainly for this kind of reasoning. Now I do it because it amuses me to do so. I even did it in a game where the gender doesn't even matter (the game never does anything with it) and found a crash bug that shipped with the game.
Other than the fact that The Boss in Saints Row 2 is really just a male avatar with a female voice and some graphics changes, it was pretty awesome running a violent street gang as a woman. (And wouldn't GTA be pretty awesome like that?)
So now, I do it because it's an option and I've never shied away from a game because the protagonist is female-only.
But I already know I'm not in the majority. The games that sell are the games that have male leads because the games that are made are games that have male leads. Getting either to change more significantly is going to take a long time.
is it even really in their benefits? you are unlikely to find much of an audience with women so making a game with female leads isn't going to be as profitable creating a catch 22
is it even really in their benefits? you are unlikely to find much of an audience with women so making a game with female leads isn't going to be as profitable creating a catch 22
Can someone type out what he said? I'm behind a firewall.
By Wesley Yin-Poole Published Thursday, 22 November 2012
THQ has clarified comments made by one of the developers of upcoming first-person shooter Metro: Last Light about the Wii U CPU.
This week 4A Games' chief technical officer Oles Shishkovtsov told NowGamer: “[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU” by way of explaining why a Wii U version of Metro wasn't in the works.
Yesterday Eurogamer spoke with THQ's Huw Beynon, who works full time as a representative of 4A Games and Metro, to expand on Shishkovtsov's comment.
“I think there was one comment made by Oles the programmer - the guy who built the engine,” he said.
“It's a very CPU intensive game. I think it's been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform.
“I think that what frustrates me about the way the story's been spun out is that there's been no opportunity to say, 'Well, yes, on that one individual piece maybe it's not as... maybe his opinion is that it's not as easy for the way that the 4A engine's been built as is the others.
“What it doesn't go on to look at is to say that, you know, we could probably get around that. We could probably get Metro to run on an iPad if we wanted, or on pretty much anything. Just as in the same way that between PC and current console versions there are some compromises that need to be made in certain places and we strive to get the very best performance that we can from any platform we release on.
“But I understand that there's a real appetite in the media at the moment because the Wii U is a hot topic to spam some stories that are going to attract a lot of links if they present it in a certain way.”
So, will Metro: Last Light ever appear on Nintendo's first high definition home console?
“We looked at Wii U as a target platform,” Beynon said. "It's a really small studio. There were 50 for Metro 2033, there are 80 now. With Metro 2033 most of their experience was with the PC. The Xbox 360 was their first console version. We've now added PlayStation 3 to the mix.
“We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It's certainly possible, and it's something we thought we'd like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we're trying to focus on, already adding a PlayStation 3 SKU, or we probably wouldn't be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we'd want.
“It would be a port or we wouldn't be able to get to grips with the system. That's really the essence of it. It's something we can potentially look at and return to later. Given the targets we've set for the game, it didn't make sense to proceed with it at this point.”
It would be a port or we wouldn't be able to get to grips with the system. That's really the essence of it
THQ's Huw Beynon
Shishkovtsov's quote sparked much debate online about the impact of the Wii U'S IBM PowerPC processor. Wii U developers Eurogamer spoke to for a wide-ranging investigation into the power of the console ahead of its release told us the clock speed offered by it is slower than that of the PS3 and Xbox 360's CPU.
At the Tokyo Game Show in September, Akihiro Suzuki, producer of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, told Eurogamer the performance of the Wii U version of Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper was impacted by it.
"For games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU,” he said.
"Dealing with that is a challenge."
Last night Gustav Halling, lead designer on Battlefield 3: Armored Kill at Swedish studio DICE, backed up Shishkovtsov, saying on Twitter he was concerned about the impact the next Xbox and PlayStation will have on the Wii U and "annoyed" that Nintendo "don't think ahead at all".
“This is also what I been hearing within the industry, too bad since it will shorten its life a lot when new gen starts,” he said.
Then: “GPU and RAM is nice to have shaders/textures loaded. Physics and gameplay run on CPU mostly so player count is affected etc.”
“I don't actually know what makes it slow, but enough 'tech' people I trust in world are saying the same things.”
But, “Should be a great fun platform if you are a Nintendo fan the coming years and the memory and GPU part looks good!”
The Wii U has 2GB of RAM - 1GB is reserved for system memory and 1GB is available to games - twice the amount inside the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. The GPU is an AMD Radeon High Definition unit with an eDRAM cache built onto the die.
But what, exactly, is going on with the Wii U CPU? To find out, I asked Digital Foundry chief Richard Leadbetter. Here's what he said.
“Outside of dev circles the Wii U CPU is a bit of a mystery. Just about the only confirmed facts are that IBM has produced it and it's been fabricated on a 45nm process - just like the combined CPU/GPU in the Xbox 360.
"Based on rough calculations, the Wii U CPU occupies the same amount of silicon - and so has a roughly similar amount number of transistors - as a single Xbox 360 core (update: plus the L2 cache) in the Xenon tri-core processor. Transistor count alone can't be used to judge 'power' as such (though that's what Moore's Law is based on) but it's safe to say there'd need to be a huge amount of efficiency gains to produce anything like the same amount of processing power as the 360 with that silicon budget."
Leadbetter added: "While we're on the subject of power, it is worth pointing out that an Xbox 360 Slim draws around 70 watts from the mains. The Wii U is closer to 35 watts. In terms of overall performance from power consumed, that's rather impressive.”
So basically just frustration that Nintendo didn't put in a stronger cpu, and that it will cause some problems for porting games. Probably why a few of the early ports have poor framerates.
Fortunately, the kind of people who would actually pay into Kickstarter are the kind of people who know just how much of an ass Molyneux is. I don't think we have to worry too much about him getting millions through Kickstarter and pissing it all down the drain; stuff like Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland 2, and Star Citizen are all projects made by real vets with reputations actually worth a damn and people know that. Those guys are all reviving things that were written off by publishers long ago despite obvious player interest, whereas the only thing Molyneux will be trying to revive is his ego.
I'm going to nit-pick this a tad. Those three Kickstarter wunderkind you listed? The only reason you're not potentially saying the same thing about Jordan Weisman (Shadowrun), Brian Fargo (Wasteland), and Chris Roberts (Star Citizen) that you are about Molyneux is that they haven't actually done anything in recent memory for you to judge them on.
Weisman's done very little (only one children's game, a book or two, and started a license holding company for FASA properties) since leaving Microsoft a decade ago. Brian Fargo's been the busiest of the three since Bard's Tale back in 2004 (which wasn't well received), and since has only been a leading dev on Hunted: The Demon's Forge (which was also not well received) and a Choplifter HD remake that I'd never even heard happened. Chris Roberts is probably the worst of the bunch, having been in essential retirement since 2001. You want to talk "reviving egos"? There's not much else more egotistical than asking for money for pet projects by trumpeting your glories of literal decades past while avoiding the question of "Well, what have you done for me lately?" I'm pulling for those three Kickstarter projects and desperately want them to succeed, but I'm also not going to go all goggle-eyed over Chris Roberts giving me an asspat and a smile and telling me that Star Citizen is going to be the bee's knees.
So yeah, I think the vitriol spewed at Molyneux should be toned down a bit, and I say that as someone who's been burned by him twice (Black & White - shame on him, Fable 1 - shame on me) and wisely learned to give his projects a wide berth.
Chris Roberts was not even close to being retired, he was busy producing movies. Whether those movies were good, that's debatable, but he was working. And producing movies is a good skill to transfer over to game projects.
The thinking that a female lead must appeal to female players is what causes this nonsense in the first place.
I don't know about this.
Really, I would say most female leads in games are rarely made to appeal to female gamers.
They're either gender neutral(which is fine I believe) or very obviously oriented at males.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited November 2012
I'd be happy if characters in video games were actually of a level where you would want to see more focus on female protagonists. Badly done male is something you can ignore because its merely boring but badly done female is downright offensive and seriously irritating.
So while, ideally, I'd like there to be more female characters...I'd really rather all characters, everywhere, in all games, grew up. Maybe past their teens.
It's really sad that exceptions to this blanket statement are so few they can be genuinely described as outliers.
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+1
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
This female leads thing has kinda been dragging on this week, I don't even remember what the source is anymore.
There's an article up on Gamasutra regarding these guys who have an idea for audio-only based games for iOS platforms, so that playing games while driving is safer. Being that I'm a firm believer that any distraction while driving can be a danger, this idea is still dumb.
Also I am now aware that there are jackasses playing mobile apps while driving. I'd like to punch each of them in the face and snap their phones in two. God.
This female leads thing has kinda been dragging on this week, I don't even remember what the source is anymore.
There's an article up on Gamasutra regarding these guys who have an idea for audio-only based games for iOS platforms, so that playing games while driving is safer. Being that I'm a firm believer that any distraction while driving can be a danger, this idea is still dumb.
Also I am now aware that there are jackasses playing mobile apps while driving. I'd like to punch each of them in the face and snap their phones in two. God.
Man, it's not like they're playing Call of Duty or anything. Mobile games aren't real games.
This female leads thing has kinda been dragging on this week, I don't even remember what the source is anymore.
There's an article up on Gamasutra regarding these guys who have an idea for audio-only based games for iOS platforms, so that playing games while driving is safer. Being that I'm a firm believer that any distraction while driving can be a danger, this idea is still dumb.
Also I am now aware that there are jackasses playing mobile apps while driving. I'd like to punch each of them in the face and snap their phones in two. God.
Audio-only as in no graphics and just sound? Or Audio-Only as in voice controlled games?
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
This female leads thing has kinda been dragging on this week, I don't even remember what the source is anymore.
There's an article up on Gamasutra regarding these guys who have an idea for audio-only based games for iOS platforms, so that playing games while driving is safer. Being that I'm a firm believer that any distraction while driving can be a danger, this idea is still dumb.
Also I am now aware that there are jackasses playing mobile apps while driving. I'd like to punch each of them in the face and snap their phones in two. God.
Audio-only as in no graphics and just sound? Or Audio-Only as in voice controlled games?
Yeah as in, voice-controlled and ear-received content. The idea is to let people keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Still, the attention needed to give to the games would be a danger, I argue. Something you listen to relatively passively like the radio or your iPod tunes isn't that bad, because you don't have to interact with it. As soon as interaction becomes a factor, concentration is taken away from the driving.
I'm a bit of a hardass when it comes to bad drivers, admittedly. I've been one degree removed from too many situations of someone being fucking idiotic behind the wheel.
+1
DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
...Why would you play games while driving?
+5
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
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I think there's an unspoken issue here in that, quite frankly, I haven't seen ANY depiction of a female that has satisfied the majority of people. It's like there's no middle ground between "man with tits" and "female stereotype" and I think a lot of developers are just plainly not sure how to make a character "female" without just taking a "male" character and making it girly.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty funny when you consider how fucking flat the characterization of most male characters is: is it any wonder they suck at female characters?
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
I think there's an unspoken issue here in that, quite frankly, I haven't seen ANY depiction of a female that has satisfied the majority of people. It's like there's no middle ground between "man with tits" and "female stereotype" and I think a lot of developers are just plainly not sure how to make a character "female" without just taking a "male" character and making it girly.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty funny when you consider how fucking flat the characterization of most male characters is: is it any wonder they suck at female characters?
I think the best part is when women make female characters and base them on their own experiences, yet they get blasted for it. The extreme scrutiny is an unfortunate side effect of them being a minority in nearly all western media (books possibly being the sole exception).
I don't think gamers even really care as much about gender as marketers think they do. Would AC3 have sold much less if Aveline was the star instead of Connor? Would a CoD featuring a female soldier really hurt the popularity of the game in any significant way? I doubt it.
Yes but more due to the still mainstream concept of the soldier with a hard job to do. Add in gaming's pechant for how it conceives Strong Independent Women... and there could have been issues.
Mind I would have preferred Aveline. Connor's is just a little too on the nose and as a third installment character feet of clay chosen one lead by misconception of his purity of purpose feels a little...incongruous.
I think there's an unspoken issue here in that, quite frankly, I haven't seen ANY depiction of a female that has satisfied the majority of people. It's like there's no middle ground between "man with tits" and "female stereotype" and I think a lot of developers are just plainly not sure how to make a character "female" without just taking a "male" character and making it girly.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty funny when you consider how fucking flat the characterization of most male characters is: is it any wonder they suck at female characters?
I think the best part is when women make female characters and base them on their own experiences, yet they get blasted for it. The extreme scrutiny is an unfortunate side effect of them being a minority in nearly all western media (books possibly being the sole exception).
Honestly, at the end of the day as far as writing goes I think Morninglord and Scottsman have it on the nose.
People barely write dudes as more than one-dimensional player devices so we can't be too surprised when females are done in the same way.
I think there's an unspoken issue here in that, quite frankly, I haven't seen ANY depiction of a female that has satisfied the majority of people. It's like there's no middle ground between "man with tits" and "female stereotype" and I think a lot of developers are just plainly not sure how to make a character "female" without just taking a "male" character and making it girly.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty funny when you consider how fucking flat the characterization of most male characters is: is it any wonder they suck at female characters?
It got mentioned in a RPS interview recently: that there is an important difference between feminist and anti-sexist narrative.
Also, when did "man" became neutral?
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
I think there's an unspoken issue here in that, quite frankly, I haven't seen ANY depiction of a female that has satisfied the majority of people. It's like there's no middle ground between "man with tits" and "female stereotype" and I think a lot of developers are just plainly not sure how to make a character "female" without just taking a "male" character and making it girly.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty funny when you consider how fucking flat the characterization of most male characters is: is it any wonder they suck at female characters?
I think the best part is when women make female characters and base them on their own experiences, yet they get blasted for it. The extreme scrutiny is an unfortunate side effect of them being a minority in nearly all western media (books possibly being the sole exception).
Being female does not mean you can make a non offensive female character. The thing about cultural stereotypes is that they are shared by the whole culture...not just one gender. I know I am guilty of silly male stereotypical thoughts and behaviors in my own life as a result of reacting to implied standards of behavior I have picked up from the culture at large and if I based a character on myself that included this I would get criticised for that too. Or at least I should be.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
I think there's an unspoken issue here in that, quite frankly, I haven't seen ANY depiction of a female that has satisfied the majority of people. It's like there's no middle ground between "man with tits" and "female stereotype" and I think a lot of developers are just plainly not sure how to make a character "female" without just taking a "male" character and making it girly.
Of course, the whole thing is pretty funny when you consider how fucking flat the characterization of most male characters is: is it any wonder they suck at female characters?
I think the best part is when women make female characters and base them on their own experiences, yet they get blasted for it. The extreme scrutiny is an unfortunate side effect of them being a minority in nearly all western media (books possibly being the sole exception).
Being female does not mean you can make a non offensive female character. The thing about cultural stereotypes is that they are shared by the whole culture...not just one gender. I know I am guilty of silly male stereotypical thoughts and behaviors in my own life as a result of reacting to implied standards of behavior I have picked up from the culture at large and if I based a character on myself that included this I would get criticised for that too. Or at least I should be.
I guess I take issue with men being the ones to determine how a woman should write.
This female leads thing has kinda been dragging on this week, I don't even remember what the source is anymore.
There's an article up on Gamasutra regarding these guys who have an idea for audio-only based games for iOS platforms, so that playing games while driving is safer. Being that I'm a firm believer that any distraction while driving can be a danger, this idea is still dumb.
Also I am now aware that there are jackasses playing mobile apps while driving. I'd like to punch each of them in the face and snap their phones in two. God.
Audio-only as in no graphics and just sound? Or Audio-Only as in voice controlled games?
Yeah as in, voice-controlled and ear-received content. The idea is to let people keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Still, the attention needed to give to the games would be a danger, I argue. Something you listen to relatively passively like the radio or your iPod tunes isn't that bad, because you don't have to interact with it. As soon as interaction becomes a factor, concentration is taken away from the driving.
I'm a bit of a hardass when it comes to bad drivers, admittedly. I've been one degree removed from too many situations of someone being fucking idiotic behind the wheel.
I have a confession to make. I came up with this same idea for an audio-only, voice-controlled game several years ago (pre-iPod era). During my time at school for game design, I bounced it off several people to see what they thought. Most people agreed that it would be distracting and I eventually conceded that it would be a bad idea.
Games catch enough flak from the media as it is, but it would only take one accident with a game like this to cause a full-on media firestorm.
"People playing games while driving? Find out why you are your children aren't safe on the road anymore!"
You thought it was bad before with pedophiles pictochatting with your kids while in a moving vehicle....
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Black and White was ass? B-b-but IGN gave it a 9.7! It must be the best PC game ever made!
http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/03/27/black-white-3
I'm going to nit-pick this a tad. Those three Kickstarter wunderkind you listed? The only reason you're not potentially saying the same thing about Jordan Weisman (Shadowrun), Brian Fargo (Wasteland), and Chris Roberts (Star Citizen) that you are about Molyneux is that they haven't actually done anything in recent memory for you to judge them on.
Weisman's done very little (only one children's game, a book or two, and started a license holding company for FASA properties) since leaving Microsoft a decade ago. Brian Fargo's been the busiest of the three since Bard's Tale back in 2004 (which wasn't well received), and since has only been a leading dev on Hunted: The Demon's Forge (which was also not well received) and a Choplifter HD remake that I'd never even heard happened. Chris Roberts is probably the worst of the bunch, having been in essential retirement since 2001. You want to talk "reviving egos"? There's not much else more egotistical than asking for money for pet projects by trumpeting your glories of literal decades past while avoiding the question of "Well, what have you done for me lately?" I'm pulling for those three Kickstarter projects and desperately want them to succeed, but I'm also not going to go all goggle-eyed over Chris Roberts giving me an asspat and a smile and telling me that Star Citizen is going to be the bee's knees.
So yeah, I think the vitriol spewed at Molyneux should be toned down a bit, and I say that as someone who's been burned by him twice (Black & White - shame on him, Fable 1 - shame on me) and wisely learned to give his projects a wide berth.
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Anyway, Eurocom: I imagine it had more to do with them not really making AAA games and non-AAA games going down the tubes instead of console games as a whole.
You know what? I like that response. It's not backpedaling, it's just saying "hey, he said these things and he's probably got a good reason for it, why don't you sites stop trying to drag attention to yourselves by turning it into console wars?".
Actually? Yes, they do. They do it during focus testing - ask someone if they'd play the game if the protagonist is female. I am sure some games with androgynous protagonists even present the game to the focus groups with a female lead on occasion, though that is more expensive.
This isn't a discussion about gaming in particular. It's about the cultural norms of sales. On a fundamental level in this country, we train people to pick up "male" and "female" markers that are carried with us through our entire lives. Gaming has a very long history of being male-marked, because shooting, violence, and electronics have all been male-marked for a much longer time. Attempts to change that have been very, very slow.
Want the best example of this? Samus Motherfucking Aran. In that game, it should not matter in any way what gender the protagonist is. After all, it's a small number of pixels in an orange and red blob on the screen (NES version). Yet the manual always referred to Samus as male in the US and i believe gender neutral in Japan. The reveal that Samus was a female blew people's minds. Here, all of a sudden, you have a female protagonist who can hold her own against the toughest male video game heroes at the time. Yet in the US, everyone tried to get Samus into her bikini, and in Japan Metroid was one of the poorest selling games in Nintendo's stable. Then continue that through the rest of the series - For every move to make Samus more badass and independent, some setback appeared - Super Metroid introduced the zero suit and getting to see (the now blonde haired) Samus in skintight clothing - and further depictions built on that. In Fusion and Other M (which I've only heard commented on), you have her move a bit more towards the typical Japanese female stereotype, likely to help the games sell better in Japan. About the only universally positive depiction of Samus is the Prime games, where she is for the most part mute.
Here's the thing. There's a few stereotypes that our culture allows for females (which, thankfully, are expanding). Video game characters are allowed into a subset of those - Damsel in Distress, cold hardass bitch, flirtatious eye candy, emotional torrent. Those are the four I most often see depicted. Even if there is a character arc involved and the character gets to be three dimensional (which happens less and less anymore), you'll see those stereotypes get hit on. About the only exceptions I can think of are RPGs - either because they actually need to populate a world, or alternatively because they've already designed the male half of the game and the female gender choice needs to have parity or people will bitch -- like they did with Mass Effect and the sex options.
Companies are going to do what sells. And in our culture, the vast majority of males aren't ready to project themselves as a female unless they get eye candy out of it (such as guys playing women in MMOs because they have to stare at their characters' asses for so long). Therefore, games where you are female aren't going to sell as well.. Or so their logic goes. Very few companies have actually given it a shot to see if it works or not; instead they just follow conventional wisdom.
Luckily, conventional wisdom's going to cause the industry great pain if things don't change in the next few years.
If the CPU doesn't fit the needs of the game it's fine to point it out. If anyone gets defensive about that, that's silly. The guy who made the comment clearly could have and should have put it better, but whatever, he's not a spokesperson by career. Just some guy frustrated about something.
The length of the official THQ response seems unnecessary. Should've just been, "One of our guys mouthed off and is frustrated. The end."
I just want to chime in and admit that when I first started picking female avatars, I did it mainly for this kind of reasoning. Now I do it because it amuses me to do so. I even did it in a game where the gender doesn't even matter (the game never does anything with it) and found a crash bug that shipped with the game.
Other than the fact that The Boss in Saints Row 2 is really just a male avatar with a female voice and some graphics changes, it was pretty awesome running a violent street gang as a woman. (And wouldn't GTA be pretty awesome like that?)
So now, I do it because it's an option and I've never shied away from a game because the protagonist is female-only.
But I already know I'm not in the majority. The games that sell are the games that have male leads because the games that are made are games that have male leads. Getting either to change more significantly is going to take a long time.
Really? Why's that?
Can someone type out what he said? I'm behind a firewall.
By Wesley Yin-Poole Published Thursday, 22 November 2012
THQ has clarified comments made by one of the developers of upcoming first-person shooter Metro: Last Light about the Wii U CPU.
This week 4A Games' chief technical officer Oles Shishkovtsov told NowGamer: “[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU” by way of explaining why a Wii U version of Metro wasn't in the works.
Yesterday Eurogamer spoke with THQ's Huw Beynon, who works full time as a representative of 4A Games and Metro, to expand on Shishkovtsov's comment.
“I think there was one comment made by Oles the programmer - the guy who built the engine,” he said.
“It's a very CPU intensive game. I think it's been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform.
“I think that what frustrates me about the way the story's been spun out is that there's been no opportunity to say, 'Well, yes, on that one individual piece maybe it's not as... maybe his opinion is that it's not as easy for the way that the 4A engine's been built as is the others.
“What it doesn't go on to look at is to say that, you know, we could probably get around that. We could probably get Metro to run on an iPad if we wanted, or on pretty much anything. Just as in the same way that between PC and current console versions there are some compromises that need to be made in certain places and we strive to get the very best performance that we can from any platform we release on.
“But I understand that there's a real appetite in the media at the moment because the Wii U is a hot topic to spam some stories that are going to attract a lot of links if they present it in a certain way.”
So, will Metro: Last Light ever appear on Nintendo's first high definition home console?
“We looked at Wii U as a target platform,” Beynon said. "It's a really small studio. There were 50 for Metro 2033, there are 80 now. With Metro 2033 most of their experience was with the PC. The Xbox 360 was their first console version. We've now added PlayStation 3 to the mix.
“We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It's certainly possible, and it's something we thought we'd like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we're trying to focus on, already adding a PlayStation 3 SKU, or we probably wouldn't be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we'd want.
“It would be a port or we wouldn't be able to get to grips with the system. That's really the essence of it. It's something we can potentially look at and return to later. Given the targets we've set for the game, it didn't make sense to proceed with it at this point.”
It would be a port or we wouldn't be able to get to grips with the system. That's really the essence of it
THQ's Huw Beynon
Shishkovtsov's quote sparked much debate online about the impact of the Wii U'S IBM PowerPC processor. Wii U developers Eurogamer spoke to for a wide-ranging investigation into the power of the console ahead of its release told us the clock speed offered by it is slower than that of the PS3 and Xbox 360's CPU.
At the Tokyo Game Show in September, Akihiro Suzuki, producer of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, told Eurogamer the performance of the Wii U version of Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper was impacted by it.
"For games in the Warriors series, including Dynasty Warriors and Warriors Orochi, when you have a lot of enemies coming at you at once, the performance tends to be affected because of the CPU,” he said.
"Dealing with that is a challenge."
Last night Gustav Halling, lead designer on Battlefield 3: Armored Kill at Swedish studio DICE, backed up Shishkovtsov, saying on Twitter he was concerned about the impact the next Xbox and PlayStation will have on the Wii U and "annoyed" that Nintendo "don't think ahead at all".
“This is also what I been hearing within the industry, too bad since it will shorten its life a lot when new gen starts,” he said.
Then: “GPU and RAM is nice to have shaders/textures loaded. Physics and gameplay run on CPU mostly so player count is affected etc.”
“I don't actually know what makes it slow, but enough 'tech' people I trust in world are saying the same things.”
But, “Should be a great fun platform if you are a Nintendo fan the coming years and the memory and GPU part looks good!”
The Wii U has 2GB of RAM - 1GB is reserved for system memory and 1GB is available to games - twice the amount inside the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. The GPU is an AMD Radeon High Definition unit with an eDRAM cache built onto the die.
But what, exactly, is going on with the Wii U CPU? To find out, I asked Digital Foundry chief Richard Leadbetter. Here's what he said.
“Outside of dev circles the Wii U CPU is a bit of a mystery. Just about the only confirmed facts are that IBM has produced it and it's been fabricated on a 45nm process - just like the combined CPU/GPU in the Xbox 360.
"Based on rough calculations, the Wii U CPU occupies the same amount of silicon - and so has a roughly similar amount number of transistors - as a single Xbox 360 core (update: plus the L2 cache) in the Xenon tri-core processor. Transistor count alone can't be used to judge 'power' as such (though that's what Moore's Law is based on) but it's safe to say there'd need to be a huge amount of efficiency gains to produce anything like the same amount of processing power as the 360 with that silicon budget."
Leadbetter added: "While we're on the subject of power, it is worth pointing out that an Xbox 360 Slim draws around 70 watts from the mains. The Wii U is closer to 35 watts. In terms of overall performance from power consumed, that's rather impressive.”
So basically just frustration that Nintendo didn't put in a stronger cpu, and that it will cause some problems for porting games. Probably why a few of the early ports have poor framerates.
Chris Roberts was not even close to being retired, he was busy producing movies. Whether those movies were good, that's debatable, but he was working. And producing movies is a good skill to transfer over to game projects.
I don't know about this.
Really, I would say most female leads in games are rarely made to appeal to female gamers.
They're either gender neutral(which is fine I believe) or very obviously oriented at males.
So while, ideally, I'd like there to be more female characters...I'd really rather all characters, everywhere, in all games, grew up. Maybe past their teens.
It's really sad that exceptions to this blanket statement are so few they can be genuinely described as outliers.
There's an article up on Gamasutra regarding these guys who have an idea for audio-only based games for iOS platforms, so that playing games while driving is safer. Being that I'm a firm believer that any distraction while driving can be a danger, this idea is still dumb.
Also I am now aware that there are jackasses playing mobile apps while driving. I'd like to punch each of them in the face and snap their phones in two. God.
Man, it's not like they're playing Call of Duty or anything. Mobile games aren't real games.
Audio-only as in no graphics and just sound? Or Audio-Only as in voice controlled games?
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Yeah as in, voice-controlled and ear-received content. The idea is to let people keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Still, the attention needed to give to the games would be a danger, I argue. Something you listen to relatively passively like the radio or your iPod tunes isn't that bad, because you don't have to interact with it. As soon as interaction becomes a factor, concentration is taken away from the driving.
I'm a bit of a hardass when it comes to bad drivers, admittedly. I've been one degree removed from too many situations of someone being fucking idiotic behind the wheel.
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Of course, the whole thing is pretty funny when you consider how fucking flat the characterization of most male characters is: is it any wonder they suck at female characters?
Yeah, I guess that's true.
But I'm the type of guy whose paranoid about getting into accidents. Hell, I don't even like turning the radio while I'm driving.
I think the best part is when women make female characters and base them on their own experiences, yet they get blasted for it. The extreme scrutiny is an unfortunate side effect of them being a minority in nearly all western media (books possibly being the sole exception).
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Mind I would have preferred Aveline. Connor's is just a little too on the nose and as a third installment character feet of clay chosen one lead by misconception of his purity of purpose feels a little...incongruous.
Honestly, at the end of the day as far as writing goes I think Morninglord and Scottsman have it on the nose.
People barely write dudes as more than one-dimensional player devices so we can't be too surprised when females are done in the same way.
It got mentioned in a RPS interview recently: that there is an important difference between feminist and anti-sexist narrative.
Also, when did "man" became neutral?
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
Being female does not mean you can make a non offensive female character. The thing about cultural stereotypes is that they are shared by the whole culture...not just one gender. I know I am guilty of silly male stereotypical thoughts and behaviors in my own life as a result of reacting to implied standards of behavior I have picked up from the culture at large and if I based a character on myself that included this I would get criticised for that too. Or at least I should be.
I guess I take issue with men being the ones to determine how a woman should write.
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I have a confession to make. I came up with this same idea for an audio-only, voice-controlled game several years ago (pre-iPod era). During my time at school for game design, I bounced it off several people to see what they thought. Most people agreed that it would be distracting and I eventually conceded that it would be a bad idea.
Games catch enough flak from the media as it is, but it would only take one accident with a game like this to cause a full-on media firestorm.
"People playing games while driving? Find out why you are your children aren't safe on the road anymore!"
You thought it was bad before with pedophiles pictochatting with your kids while in a moving vehicle....
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