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Rare Still Leery of Downloadable Content
GamesIndustry.biz reports on comments by Rare lead designer Gregg Mayles, who has gone on record saying that Rare will only do downloadable content if there is a need. The popularity of their Viva Piñata title notwithstanding, the company has no interest in making content if there is no interest. From the article: "'We've got plenty of ideas for what we can do with downloadable content because Piñata is such a unique game ... But the jury is still out.' However, the team does still see the potential of Xbox Live and the push for downloadable content, with Viva Piñata offering interaction between players over the service. 'That vision of sending Piñata to each other was around before Xbox Live even existed. That's why [Viva Piñata] began life on a handheld PDA device because we wanted one machine that could communicate with another,' revealed Mayles."
Hey who knows, this whole networking thing could catch on... NAH, we'll just keep working in isolation and see if everyone else is wrong about it...
I personally hope that everyone else is wrong about a micropayment based horse armor/episodal content system; personally, I don't want to spend $150+ to buy all of the race tracks and cars that were available in the base game in the previous generation.
And I, for one, applaud Rare for wanting to release finished products.
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Neither Kameo no Perfect Dark Zero were that great. I have fond memories of Goldeneye, Diddy Kong Racing and Conkers Bad Fur Day, but the nostalgia may be clouding my judgement. Going back and playing these games now, they're not bad for a quick laugh, but they're not holding the attention the way I remember it. Where they really a great developer at all? Three stand out games and a bunch of other really, really ordinary titles doesn't really scream greatness to me. Especially considering the long development cycle of the games you mentioned, shouldn't the end result have been something truly outstanding?
I can't say that I've had too much hands on time with either Kameo or Perfect Dark Zero but what I would say is that the problem with these games was not lack of skill or shoddy development work but that there were better games that were released before either of these games. With Game Development you're trying to hit a moving target, this target is pretty clear 12 months ahead of time, kind of blury 24 months ahead of time, and very hard to see 36 months ahead of time; I could imagine it would be nearly impossible to predict where games would be 60+ months in the future.
Goldeneye will suck in comparison to modern console FPS mainly because it was the game which spawned the genre on consoles; in the past 10 years they have come a long way. Conkers BFD would probably feel dated but I suspect the gameplay would still be fun, and I never liked DKR because I though Mario Kart was far superior. The game I think would demonstrate how great Rare once was would be Banjo Kazooie. Banjo Kazooie was probably the only platformer of the generation I thought was better that Mario 64, although Mario 64 was more important because it was more revolutionary; I personally don't think many games that have been released since then really exceed the quality of either of these games without moving drastically away from simple platforming.
I did, however, enjoy every game that Rare created for Nintendo. Here's hoping they can beat thier old classics.
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