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Gaming Gaffes of 2003 Pinpointed?
jvm writes "It seems that every gaming website has a Best of 2003 feature going now, and we felt that was just too cheery for our tastes. To counter that positive energy, we've assembled Gaming Gaffes of 2003 over at Curmudgeon Gamer, a list of the most embarrassing, disheartening, and bone-headed developments in the game industry over the past year. We've tried to give everyone a little frank criticism, from Sony's PlayStation 2 Online service through the lack of a Loki successor for Linux gaming, as well as specific products like EA's The Sims Online. Did we miss any?"
It seems to me that icculus is the Loki successor. IMHO Mr. Gordon is doing a pretty good job in that regard.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
With all that being said, and coming from a PC gaming background, the lack of a service like XBox Live to sign into but rather a game to game solution to the situation hasn't really bothered me. I won't say it is unnessecary hand-holding but it is something I don't think I need to pay for. Now, what I would like is more online enabled games for the PS2 (and the Gamecube already!) but if there were going to be individual charges for games (that didn't have persistent worlds where there was a lot of overhead - PSO, Everquest), I would move to XBox Live. I'd rather pay a flat fee and get all the sports, fighting, and racing games I can play then pay for individual sports, fighting, and racing games.
Assuming I have misspoken somewhere in this long-winded rant and you have found my mistake where I said X but Y was correct, you may take my apologies and realize that I meant to say Y. (I just don't feel like playing the nit-picking game today, which is what happens on Slashdot a lot.)
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
This is hardly news to those of us who are paying attention: Rare (point #8 in the article) has been going down the tubes for far longer than one might imagine. Check out their back catalogue: They've made five (count them) games in the last three years, and only Conker's Bad Fur Day was any cop. That was long before the Microsoft sale.
Perfect Dark Zero? Don't make me laugh. PDZ isn't going to happen. There is no evidence that it's even in production - the character models that were floating around a year ago prove zilch. I'd be very surprised to see it this side of 2006 or the next hardware generation, whichever is later. (It never ceases to amaze me, the number of people who bought a GameCube for PDZ despite the fact that it had never even been announced... and the number of those people who then bought an Xbox for precisely the same reason...)
qntm.org
It was that bad. It was basically a chat room with Sims. You would sit there endlessly working on skills that had no relevence to the game and chatting. That is it, nothing more.
I cancelled my subscription about 4 days into my free 30 days.
roche
Bah Humbug!
Star Wars Galaxies was a big gaff. They released the product very shortly after the beta and didn't fix a host of problems, the main one being the economy.
One very fundamental mistake was how they dealt with making people a Jedi. They proported let people be whatever profession they wanted, and that everyone had a chance to become a Jedi. However, those are mutually exclusive. It turns out that in order to become a Jedi, unless you got really really lucky, you had to drop whatever profession you had been working on, and start doing something completely different. Not only that, but once you became a master at that new profession, you had to drop that one two, and master other professions.
That's not choice...that's letting the random number generator choose how you're going to play the game.
A better alternative would have been to have completely seperate profession points that you had to spend in completely different professions beyond the "basic" set. You'd still be able to be a bounty hunter, architect, or whatever, but secretly be working on being a Jedi.
Anyway, since people have found this out a couple of months ago, there are already 100 Jedi running around the servers. I expect that to go way up during the next few months, unless they (the SWG team) step in to slow things down.
I didn't want this to be like Everquest, but you'd think these guys would have taken the hint and look at what game mechanics made EQ popular, and try and enhance THOSE, rather than doing what they did: taking a stab in the dark with a lightsaber, and completely missing.
The problem with TSO wasn't so much that it was a chatroom. The idea of a chatroom with the extensive home decorating and customization abilities The Sims has is appealing; carving your own little personal niche in the game world, to your liking and tastes and having friends over to hang out and party is cool. Add in a few interactive minigames and some easy user content systems and you're done...
No, the problem was that somewhere along the line they decided what people loved about the Sims wasn't the creativity the player could exercise, but it was -- ready for this? -- RAISING METERS! Yes, the real fun of the Sims is working on your 'skills', making money with meaningless treadmilling, and traditional MMORPG character building. Add on top of that a complete lack of user-created content and you've got TSO. After all, The Sims is so amazingly popular because of its micromanagement gameplay challenge, right? Not because people throw on a money cheat and then goof off with the AI and building systems, right?
If TSO had been merely a chatroom but with extensive support for folks who wanted to coordinate their couch with their drapes, it might've done better than the bastard child of Everquest they were looking to make it into.
To me it seemed that the skills system they added in was mostly filler. Something to give you something to do so you do not realize there is noting to do.
All there was to do in the game was the skills system. That meant playing a guitar in game for a few hours, or even doing telemarketing. I paid 50 dollars and then 10 dollars a month to play a game where my character is a telemarketer?
That last two days I played, the only thing I could find that would even keep me the slightest bit amused was to be random peoples janitor. Thats right, the only thing I could find in the game to keep me amused was cleaning up after people and doing their dishes.
Besides the skills system that was added as a afterthought, the game is nothing more than a glorified IRC that costs money.
roche
Bah Humbug!
He does have a point about the attachment rate, though. Even if you look at PC games, the only ones that have a better ratio of online users to purchases are the MMO games, and there's a good chance that Blizzard does better than the FPS games.
Half-Life has long been the most popular FPS online, and has never had more than 1% of their CDKeys online at any one time, with a total that might run as high as 5% (considering 7 million sales in the US, it's a better number than it might seem, but not a large return on investment).
Console games have a bigger potential audience, and it looks like the attach rate for online play may be higher (though with the online purchase not being attached to a particular game in the case of Live or adapters for the PS2 and GC that could be a misleading statistic). The question is whether or not people are ready to put their consoles online and play the games online. I really don't think you're going to see a definitive answer until the next generation, especially if one of the next-gen consoles comes with a broadband adapter standard and free online play on at least some titles. For the standard single-/multi- player games PC developers found that multiplayer will be a feature that sells titles but isn't used by most of the player base, meaning that charging your users doesn't work. On the other hand you have the MMO model, which works great for pulling in money if you can get it right.
Still, I would've loved to have seen online play for Mario Kart, but it didn't happen, and I knew it wasn't going to happen before I even pre-ordered the game (granted I pre-ordered the day before it came out, when there were already reviews from the major game sites). It's not like I have to play online to play multiplayer, it would just be nice when there's no one else around.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I'm sure that no one will agree with me, but I hate HATE the 1.10 patch. I'm not a hardcore gamer; I fire up DII LOD about once a week for a little mind-numbing hack-n-slash with Conan the Barbarian. I understand that they wanted to make the game more challanging, but I feel like I'm playing with a level 10 character; it was too much of a jump for me.
Here's a quick summary as to why my level 50 barbarian that used to take on Diablo in Nightmare (without even using a health potion) is now routinely being killed by uniques in act III.
- The skills balance that worked best for my gameplay style are now worthless. Whatever rebalancing they did totally undervalued the skills that I chose to develop.
- My unique armor sets are now less useful than the regular dropped armor that I see after the patch.
- Items are now so much more expensive to repair. I have to fill my inventory with magic/expensive items to sell just so I can afford to go back to town for a "repair all". It also seems that all of my items' durabilities have been cut at least in half.
That's not all, but that's a pretty good start to making the game less enjoyable for me. I haven't read any other complaints like this in the few forums that I visited, so maybe it's just me. Anyone else unhappy with 1.10?
What about X2: The Threat (from Egosoft)? The first main problem - the only place you could get it on release day was from gogamer - it didn't seem like anyone else had it for like two weeks.
An even bigger problem was letting this game out the door with some major bugs - namely Logitech joysticks and gamepads don't work with X2!! (Like the Wingman Force 3D and Wingman Rumblepad) Doh! Apparently they went and actually bought some of these joysticks to test when they heard about these problems, but damn if it didn't put a damper on the fun of many eager space jockeys! Should be a patch soon.
Also in X2 there's many basic functions that can't be remapped!
This game is still really cool looking so far though - it's like Elite - but you can have more than one ship, run your own factories, and even control sectors. You can have capital ships, all fully modelled in 3D - including separate views for various turrets (which you can control and slave to any of three monitors).
This is what makes the stupid bugs and problems so bad - the fact that the underlying game just looks sooooo amazing...but I nearly quit in disgust in the first 30 minutes or so (actually it was a training mission that brought me back - when I had to switch views - discovering a rear mounted, controllable turret view). You can set commands for all your ships and their turrets etc.
How could nobody have mentioned, one of the most highly anticipated games of 2002, which finally came out in spring 2003, with gamers chanting "It took so long it must be good."
Why Master Of Orion 3 of course. God, I want my money back, and the month of my time I spent on the Quicksilver forums. A game that was both Unbelievably Hard to play, yet with such an idiotic AI that it was easy to win by doing nothing. They actually attempted to make a game that could play itself, that you oversaw which decisions it made for you.
A few desperate patches later, and you can find a squeal to a beloved childhood game in the bargain bin for $5.99.
Can't get that channel here (judging from the comments it appears to be a good thing), but I looked at the web page. Yeah, plenty of weird nominations.
I was completely amazed by the nominees (and winner) for the best music category. I definitely prefer games with original soundtracks as opposed to recycling Whatever's Playing on Radio at the time. Music is such an unrecognized area of the games in general, and preferring games that don't even have an original soundtrack is bad.
And "best performance by human"... ummm, maybe they should rename that to "coolest celebrities that they somehow managed to get to appear in a game"?
I was puzzled by the inclusion of Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide as a best online game nominee, because SoU doesn't have a multiplayer campaign or anything, and it only comes with stuff that lets people build their multiplayer world or adventure - and doing so requires a little bit of competence. I've never seen a non-idiot-proof construction kit to be rated that high! Nice to see that happen though, it's deserved.
And Harry Potter game nominated as a best game based on a movie. I just got this third movie of theirs, and in the box there was no DVD but tons of these paper sheet things. wtf? =) And Enter the Matrix winning that prize, now that's amazing...
(And by the way, who the hell is this Madden guy whose game won the game of the year award? Never mind, I know =)