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Tom Clancy: Endwar to Change the Face of Console RTS?
Ubisoft's Julian Geright is apparently quite confident in the power of the next installment of the Tom Clancy series with Tom Clancy: Endwar . Designed specifically for the PS3 and Xbox 360, Geright hopes that this is a breakthrough for console RTS play similar to Goldeneye's FPS breakout. "This is the first game of its type and I don't think that games on console will be made the same after Endwar, [...] It's kind of boastful, but I really do think that this is a watershed type of game."
There already was a breakout RTS series on consoles. It was called Command & Conquer.
"I don't think that games on console will be made the same after.."
I'll believe it when I see it.
As someone who bought into the guff being spouted by Free Radical (cheers Haze, that's forty notes in the bin), I'm not going to pay attention to anything apart from metacritic from now on.
From what I've seen, this game is going to be either absolutely amazing or its going to be terrible. It would take a lot for it to be the former but I'm a huge fan of console RTS games so I am truly rooting for it's success.
There is a small snippet about how "this game is going to be different". The article doesn't even bother expanding on _how_ it's going to be different! This is not news at all!
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Be yourself no matter what they say
First off, console RTS - cue the guffaws.
Second, it's 'innovative' as it uses voice recognition to command troops, so while you can manually tell your little soldiers to run here; kill there - you can also bark at them for the same result, and in fact it will be required. It is a interesting way to bypass the control problems of console RTS.
Hard to tell if it will be good - Tom Clancy has Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, but also Politika.
People have already tried RTS on consoles and failed miserably. Why should this be different?
Ultimately, both the FPS and RTS genre are undoubtedly better on the PC. Why? The mouse is a superior controller in any of those genres. Plain simple.
Am I the only person who finds that this degree of arrogance, particularly in the video game industry, is unfalteringly correlated with horrible failure? John Romero, I'm looking at you. (Among many others)
Aren't the makers of Halo Wars saying the same kinds of things? "Designed specifically for the 360," etc.? I have some serious doubts about anyone being able to pull off a decent RTS on a system without a mouse and keyboard. But please, prove me wrong.
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"This is the first game of its type and I don't think that games on console will be made the same after Endwar," he said in to CVG. "It's kind of boastful, but I really do think that this is a watershed type of game."
EndWar is a real-time strategy game made specifically for the PS3 and Xbox 360. When asked about other RTS games that have been ported to console platforms, Geright said: "I hate saying bad things about other peoples games, but when EA ships Battle for Middle Earth on PC and then goes 'okay, that's going to take a team of forty/fifty six months to get it out on 360'.
"They can do a really great job in terms of UI, they can great job in mapping the controls and making it accessible, but it remains a PC game. The difference in PC games and console games is huge, even in first person shooters. Think of before GoldenEye - people didn't play first person shooters on console. It wasn't that fun."
More on EndWar as UbiDays kicks into top gear. So some marketing guy says that this game is going to be uber l33t, and nothing will be the same afterwards. Nothing going to be the same? Reminds me of that old dialog in Ghostbusters:
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
The big deal with the game seems to be the voice commands. In theory it sounds like a great idea.
But then I just finished Rainbow Six Vegas 2, the most recent Ubisoft/Clancy release. It had a very simple voice command system, and it was almost completely unuseable. Saying "hold" five times before my teammates eventually walk into a crossfire is not an advantage over just hitting the "hold" button.
I even followed the link and RTFA, but I sure couldn't find anything supporting logic behind the claim that this game is somehow special, a breakthrough, or in any way a big deal. The closest to any logical point I could find is that the game wasn't written for a PC and then ported to consoles. But there have been other FPS games before that started on a console, so that's hardly much of a claim. It might indeed be a good game (or not), but you sure can't make that claim by what was said here.
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Anyone else try to pronounce "endwar" as en-dwar? It took me a moment to realize what they were trying to say. Anything wrong with separating words appropriately? Hyphenate? Camel Case?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
This is nothing but a blatent ad. Some guy at a comapny says, "The thing my company makes is awesome!" and that's *it*. There is zero content here? I guess I need to just make up the rest on my own? Ok, fine, "Tom Clancy: Endwar", WILL change the face of RTS gaming... It will be so bad that nobody will ever trust an RTS game to ever be fun again. It will cause heartburn.
I got sick of them a long, long time ago. The game that did in preorders forever for me was Master of Orion 3, biggest gaming waste of money ever, and I keep it around as an object lesson. As a result, I don't buy games near release anymore. There are a few exceptions, but very few. (The World Ends With You is the first game I bought day of release since FF12, but even in those cases there were a substantial number of reviews of the Japanese versions that had been released months before)
Metacritic isn't a panacea, though. They seem to cast their net wider and wider with each passing day (I halfway expect that individual GameFAQs reader reviews are going to get factored in soon enough) and because their final score is an average, you can sometimes get wildly divergent and biased views skewing the score past the point of useful representation. Lots and lots of reviewers that shouldn't be reviewing the game ("I've hated every strategy RPG ever made, so let me give you my review this new strategy RPG") or have other biases and issues. (a prime example, look up Sudeki, the top review is a perfect 10 by Maxim magazine...always my first choice for solid video game advice. I'm still not sure whether it got that score because they saw skimpily clad female characters and flipped out, or they actually got paid off by Microsoft)
Except Metacritic gives Assassin's Creed a score of 81/100. A game which after completing I gave a 5/10. This single game alone has made me lose so much faith in video game critics. The only thing I trust anyone is my friend's word of mouth.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Thank you for linking to this press release. It was very useful.
Very.
No. And when did Ubisoft hire Peter Molyneaux? This "EndWar will change console RTS" rhetoric sounds like his kind of propaganda.
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If this were any genre but RTS, they could potentially do such a thing, (I'm not saying they would, but I wouldn't call it impossible).
But RTS? RTS's are a perfect example of a genre that is best fit for the PC. For games like FPS's the console does have one advantage (though im not saying it makes up for other disadvantages), namely, that it has 2 good 2D pointing devices, whereas the PC has one excellent one(mouse), and one terrible one(D keys). Unless his new RTS is 3d (control wise) the consoles only advantage is nullified, since 2d RTS's only require 2axes of control.
To me, this seams like attempting to redesign the steering system of a car so that it can be controlled with a singe push button, even if you do an excellent job, and its much more usable than expected, I can almost guarantee that it still won't be as good as a steering wheel.
FAIL
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Just port a version of Spring and include a mouse+keyboard hardware bundle. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Let's see how it fares versus Starcraft 2 before making any wild accusations.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I've had a 360 for about a year now and I still prefer the mouse and keyboard interface though I concede that the thumbsticks are far better for a "lean back on the couch and play casually" control scheme. I'm impressed with the complexity of control scheme that can be worked into all those buttons and triggers.
That being said, I still like mouse and keyboard more for serious shooters and strategy games. I tried out the demo for Universe at War. I'm impressed with the level of control they worked into the thumbsticks but it still ultimately feels extremely cumbersome and counter-intuitive. Click and drag with a mouse, right click, bang a few keys on the keyboard, all seems more natural.
I'll give the demo a whirl and see what it's like. I gave up on Universe at War because I thought of what the uglier battles were like in classics like Total Annihilation and realized that the cumbersome interface would make me through a controller through the TV when things got heated and serious.
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Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
short answer: No
long answer: its very unlikely that a single game will define a genre these days. Sure the magazines will jump on bandwagons about half-life 2, halo, etc, but thats just because they want to sell copies.
half-life => nothing new
fable => nothing new
halo => nothing new
half-life 2 => nothing new
if anything interesting happens in gaming its definatly on the fringes, the mods, and the single purpose games. Stuff like Natural selection(RTS,FPS,RPG), cube2 (where you modify levels during the game), etc, but even these fringe games arnt genre changing they just take a tried and tested forumla and add something to it.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Or maybe, like all people, your tastes are not always perfectly in tune with the rest of the world's. I thought Assassin's Creed was an easy 75/100 at least, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, do not regret the purchase one bit. Sure, it wasn't as OMFG awesome as, say, GTA4 was, but the movement mechanics were novel, the fighting was fun, and the only annoying part was those stupid flag-capturing side missions.
I find Metacritic to be reasonably, er, reasonable when it comes to review scores, for me anyway.
"Flank left! No, the other left! Take cover! Goddamnit, why are you taking cover on the wrong side of the wall!? No, don't throw grenades at your own tanks! Ok, screw this! Go get yourselves killed!"
'Mission Accomplished'
Which is why you should read the review, not just look at scores. I'm sure most Final Fantasy games score pretty well on there too, but I find that style of gameplay bores me to tears. A quick look at an actual review will show me that despite the good scores, I'm not gonna like it.
And here I thought you were pointing out Modem Wars, which I played on my C=64.. predating the Genesis by a short while.. which.. was.. you know.. at least multiplayer.. and definitely strategy..
First few google hits are good information for those of you that never heard of it.
TBH, I think the RTS market is really divided into 2 groups; 1 is the Research/Harvest style.. Dune, Warcraft, AoE, etcc.. the 2nd (which I perfer) are games like Ground Control, WiC, Blitzkreig and a few others where you don't have any peasants to manage / gold to mine / so on.. elements that seemed to take most of the strategy out of the RTS..
Funny enough, I know people that can't stand turn-based strategy games but love the 'strategy' of RTSes, which usually seem to boil down into either early unit rushes, or end-game-heavy-unit crushes.
now where did I put my copy of WarGame Construction Set...
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Look at the fallout from Gamespot's bad review of Kane and Lynch, Ubisoft pulled a ton of ads and Gamespot fired one of their top reviewers (which later lead to a TON of fallout in the company).
My tastes don't seem in line with any reviewers anymore, except for maybe Zero Punctuation. Review scores are incredibly inflated these days and so-called blockbuster games are given amazing treatment because of all the ad money spent. Sites like Metacritic and Game Rankings are simply compiling over inflated scores where reviewers consider average an 8. People made a huge fuss over IGN giving Mario Kart Double Dash a 7.9. To me, that's a good score, definitely above average, but the way IGN (and Gamespot) have ingrained in our head that sub-8 is bad, that's just the kind of reaction they should have expected.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Um, did you ever play quake? If I remember right (and it has been a rather long time) Quake was the first FPS to have no plot at all whatsoever, not even alluded to in the manual. There was no opening cutscene, no text of any form at any point in the game, and in fact the start of the game was somewhat unique because instead of having you select difficulty from a menu, they instead dropped you into a room with 3 portals, one for each difficulty.
Wolfenstien had a plot. "Escape from castle Wolfenstien, and kill nazis". Doom had a plot. "Aliens destroyed earth and you have invaded their base and must kill them all". The plot interaction consisted of showing you the name of the next location you were attacking, and some text when you completed the episode. Oh, and you could read about the atrocities of the aliens in the game manual. Heretic has a plot with the same mechanics. Doom2 likewise. Duke3D used a plot similar to doom, except the fight started on earth. Duke3D actually had things you could interact with, but I wouldn't go as far as to call them plot elements. Quake had no plot. Quake2 had an intro plot (same used in Doom) and even an engine-rendered cinematic, but then reverted to killing everything in sight for the rest of the game, like quake 1.
Half-life was seriously the very first game I ever played which was a true fps with rpg elements. Half-life broke new ground.
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