I agree, creativity is dead. Some people may think "oh well X game got Y features in its latest game." IMO thats not creativity, thats evolution. In another 5-10 years, unless we see some serious change, every game on the market not made by independent developers will be a rehash or a remake of another game.
Even things regarding a game's difficulty is being gutted. Whens the last time anyone here played the singleplayer mode of any game and actually had trouble with it?
Demos can't really do any harm. Best case scenario : the developing team drive the hype-o-meter up off the scale (Doom? UT2k4? etc). Worst case scenario : people bitch about bugs which (hopefully) the developing team squishes.
While I think demos are nice and what-not, I think demos shouldn't always put their best foot out. While wearing gold plated shoes. And silver lined socks. Even the original Doom didn't put their BEST foot out. It held back some of the best weapons, levels and monsters. In the case of cases (independent developers), yes a demo can make or break them.
Agreed, American forces are being used more on fighting terrorists hidden in local urban areas, armed with RPGs and AKs (when the hell are AKs gonna stop appearing anyway? Half of every nation in the frikin world seems to have a couple thousand on hand.). Super high flying aircraft which were originally designed for large area-of-effect attacks are becoming unusable in today's world of humanitarian beliefs (American soldiers kill 1 woman, Americans are demons. Terrorist kills a dozen civilians riding a bus, he's a martyr.).
With this in mind, focusing on unmanned drones and whats already been proven is the best course of action. Sure you could get a super stealthy, super armed helicopter fast enough to nearly break the sound barrier. But you can't use it for another 50 years, you can't use it to attack terrorist cells because its weapons would create too much collateral damage, and it can still be taken down by a RPG and a couple hundred rounds of machine gun fire.
How is this a problem? Sounds like a huge incentive for people to start a small company and create a truly innovative game.
And whats to stop EA from buying you out? Businesses are businesses. In the real world, businesses can't say "no we won't sell out our soul for millions of dollars and millions more in budgets". Hell look at Bungie. Everyone bitching about Bungie 'selling out' to Microsoft without a thought as to maybe their FINANCIAL SITUATION. Games cost money to make. These are no longer the days when middle age parents can spend time working in their garage working on the next Doom or Ultima.
If there really were a market or just a desire for out of the mainstream games, and the talent to produce such games, the open source game efforts wouldn't be so pathetic.
Oh I'd love to create an open source game, but you know what? If I'm not getting paid for it, I'm not doing squat. Welcome to the real world, where people have real jobs, real expenses, and real lives. Theres only 24 hours in a day, and I spend over two-thirds of it going to school, studying and sleeping. The other one-third is spent doing housework, working at my job and reading books from the library. What do YOU do with your time?
The new Madden has more new features in it than any other Madden in quite some time.
And your point is?
All the recent Maddens are improved thanks to hardware advances. New playmaker control? Sorry, but before the Playstation, gamers were stuck with a simple D-pad for directional control. Adding two joysticks, doubling the RAM, and using a video card capable of drawing over a dozen players in 3D is a lot more powerful than anything the SNES or the Genesis were capable of. Thats like saying Doom 1 sucked compared to Half-Life because you couldn't look up and down, you couldn't jump, or move crates around. Its called technical limitations. For all we know Pac-Man could've been originally been designed as a 3D, 1st person view game with online multiplayer with humans playing both Pac-Man and the ghosts at the same time but was scrapped because of technical limitations at the time.
Design a stadium and new jerseys? Yeah, lets see you try to do that on 5+ year old hardware.
"hard-core fans could develop their own content, insert it into the game and make money from other fans."
So hardcore fans makes and sell content to non-hardcore fans, while the developing team makes and sells more content to the hardcore fans, while the producers makes and sells bandwidth and servers to the developing team?
Unless they charge a low price for this type of game, it won't have mass appeal. (Pay a front-end fee, a subscription fee, AND a fee for extra content? Uh, not exactly budget minded.)
Face it, today's games (mods and total conversions don't count) are no longer made in people's garages by developing teams consisting of one person. People don't have the time or money to maintain something as a video game, even one as small as a MUD. There are also other issues at hand, time spent working on the game vs time spent sleeping. Money spent on upgrading the server vs money spent on going to Europe for vacation. Social life vs virtual life. Paying job vs non-paying job. Employment vs unemployment.
The problem isn't only in getting a space type infrastructure up, its also the problem of gathering, sorting and analyzing all the infomation. We have the two rovers on Mars sending information back fairly regularly to scientists on Earth, but how many scientists do you think are working on the data being sent back? At least a couple hundred, OFFICALLY. There are probably also a couple thousand private citizens also analyzing the data as soon as its public released. Its probably easier to have one big group of people researching one planet rather than having two groups arguing over "which planet is more habitable."
Not only that there are management issues. NASA is already going insane trying to keep the two Mars rovers operational and funded. Chances are they're not going to spend a couple extra billion dollars on another planet which gets no PR.
Don't worry about it, most games have ingame tutorials and most manuals were pretty useless. You can learn how to play by experimenting with the game.
*cough*newbie*cough*
Most older games don't have tutorials. Try picking up a game of Final Fantasy I. No in game instructions, no in game tutorial, no "how-to". (Hell the game was so hard you could get killed before reaching the first boss if you chose a bad party or didn't stock up.) "Experimenting" with a game is a recent thing. If you went to an arcade in the past and (god forbid especially for fighting games) they didn't have printouts explaining how to play the game, you were pretty much throwing money away. Sure you have MAME and whatnot, but when your a 13 year old kid playing on allowance money, YOU WANT YOUR MONEY'S WORTH.
2) Check out sites like GameFAQs. Many of the best written FAQs have instructions on how to play the game in the introductions.
Again, in the past this was certainly not true. While modern connection speeds may make searching GameFAQs seem easier than flipping through a strategy guide, believe it or not there was a time when most gamers didn't know about the existance of GameFAQs (gasp).
3) Pay extra for games with manual (and box if you really want it). Then stores can pay kids selling games extra for their used games with manual (and box) and there will be incentive for them to take care of the product.
Some stores like EBGames already do that. They give you an extra.25 to $5 money for the box and manual. BIG FRIKING DEAL. Considering the most you'll ever make off a trade-in is $30, either way, you get ripped off. And so does the guy who comes in and buys it at $45.
SOME of us like to preserve our childhood. Hell some people like to collect bottlecaps and stamps, what wrong with collecting old video game boxes?
True its the same reason kids get involved in games and whatnot, but its been said before and I'll say it again : Its all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Virus writers are just lucky computers haven't advanced far enough where medical machines can be remote controlled via the internet. (Watch, if some old guy dies because his breathing unit goes down from a virus they'll be hell to pay.)
The only difference between gangs (real life ones) and virus writers is the fact that gangs do direct damage whereas virus writers do indirect damage.
How could this make my gaming experience more fun? I know Sony is trying to make an "entertainment system" with the Playstation line (PSX anyone?) but considering the majority of PS2 owners bought it for the games, how is this going to make games more fun?
Will horrible random name generating system be in this game? (For those who don't know, the original UFO Enemy Unknown featured a random name generating system. The problem with it was that first and last names were not seperated so you could have a character names James Jones or Adams Frank. Not only that they didn't seperate names by nationality so you'd have names like... well I'm sure you can think of some crazy combinations. I once played a game where I start off with 3 characters all having the same last name. Family relationship?)
A good PE instructor isn't out to make anyone feel left out or inferior. It's to make everyone try and work together and improve what they can and find out what strengths they may have. And this is coming from a mediocre PE student at best. I couldn't run, I couldn't do a billion situps, I was generally weak and couldn't shoot a basket to save my life... but I sure kicked my class's ass at dodgeball.
In theory, yes this is true. But in reality, when you go to a public school gym class you got a bare minimum of 15 kids per class (in my high school we used to have 4 groups of kids in each gym class so there was over 100 for me). The end result? You don't have to worry about the gym teacher making fun of you because you don't know the rules of basketball. You got an entire class ready and willing to make fun of you. Worse case scenario, you always get picked last in whatever game you play.. except video games.
One of the rules of security is TURN OFF ANYTHING YOU DO NOT ABSOLUTELY NEED.
But for Joe Average users, the question is : How do you know what you do not 'absolutely need' and therefore need to turn off? As it is, without being a programmer yourself and messing around with Windows yourself, Joe Average isn't going to know what the fuck 'ports' are let alone how to tell which ports are open and how to close them. Sure it may sound like reciting the ABCs for you, but do you REALLY think the majority of the public know what they are let alone know how or why they should close them?
Security is only as good as the person in charge of it. For all Joe Average knows, there could be a program installed in Windows which makes his computer 100% hacker/virus proof but if he doesn't know where it is or how to install it, its useless.
Pfft, you didn't even touch the craziest part about the C&C:Generals so-called "storyline". In some mission for some godknowswhat reason, the Chinese and the U.S. fight it out. Something about renegade generals and invading sides or something.
EA should've completely rewritten the non-existant storyline or at least change the sides considering the time of release. (Its post-9/11 and all of the sudden I'm playing a game which lets me get money for killing civilians with anthrax and car bombs? How about no?)
I disagree. I think most movie snobs are actually biased AGAINST modern movies.
I bet if you took a poll of the best movies of all time of the moviegoers in the United States today
Considering the parent post is referring to Joe Averages who see movies, you argument about movie snobs is moot. And the parent post is probably right. If there was a WIDESPREAD GENERAL PUBLIC poll between Casablanca and the LOTR (any of the three), chances are the LOTR movie would win by a landslide.
Microsoft may not include a hard drive in the next version of the Xbox console, in favor of network-based storage that would reduce the console's physical size and cost
I'm looking at my PC's hard drive right now and I don't see how a hard drive could add that much to the physical size of the Xbox. I think Microsoft needs to quit making up excuses and just get hardware companies to make specialized hardware for their system to cutting down on the size. (Just look at the size of the Gamecube. You KNOW it has specialized hardware just by its size.)
The better way? Make it happen outside the PERCEIVED area of control of the player. You and her go on different patrols. You hear her patrol being ambushed and change course to intercept. As you come closer you hear more messages until you are close and the patrol is wiped out. Far less frustating I think, a really good script writer could improve it of course.
Actually in Wing Commander Prophecy (PC version, haven't played the GBA remake), they do something you describe. In one mission, your taking off from the carrier and one of your wingmen in with a different group, already in battle. So what do I do? I hold down the afterburner button only to still be a good 3 minutes away and have him die. Thats not cool, especially considering I tried it about 7 times before realizing it was scripted so you COULDN'T save him.
This was also done in Freespace 2. In one mission you're to intercept and prevent the enemy capital ship from escaping. Naturally, something goes wrong and theres NO WAY you can catch up to it. And goddamnit, that wasn't the only mission in the game where that happened. In a mission after that you have to rescue/capture an enemy transport ship... only to get attacked by 6 HEAVY BOMBERS all scripted to launch torpedoes at virtually point blank range at an already weak target. Talk about lame!
I think the way its already set up is the best as it is. Nice scripted FMVs since it helps move the storyline along the best. There are TONS of examples in games which the player could have totally screwed up the entire storyline if he had control on the character during cutscenes (like you said Max Payne 2 had some examples, theres nearly a million in both MGS games, and theres at least one in every RPG.) At least in FMVs you give the player a sense of "so close, and yet so far" since you COULD do something but you KNOW you at the least shouldn't. If games were adopt your type of scripting, it'd be like "there was nothing you could do" or "even if you did something, would that be for the better?" In Wing Commander 2, you and your wingman is out on a mission to take out a space station. Scripted event : wingman's ship is sabotaged and ends up kamikazing the station. For better or for worse? (You could eject but then you lose the game instantly and your wingman won't return to base/eject.)
Right now theres Simcity, The Sims, train sims, capitalism sims (seriously, look it up), police riot sims, firefighting sims, military sims (America's Army), and zoo sims. Did I miss any?
I think that too much time is spent here worrying about Microsoft and not enough worrying about Sony.
I never thought of it that way, but now that you mention it, it IS true. I think people need to realize and remember that in the gaming industry (at least the console industry), Microsoft is the new kid on the block. More than that, hes the geek, the nerd, the kid no one likes, the black sheep, etc. Microsoft may be king of PCs, but when it comes to consoles, Microsoft has to use the Xbox as a money landfill otherwise the Xbox woulda gone the way of the Dreamcast years ago.
Think about it. Slashdot. Microsoft. Not exactly a friendly relationship, its more like a Cold War U.S./U.S.S.R. relationship with both sides having nukes pointed at each other. On the other hand. Slashdot. Sony. Geeks and gadgets, what could go wrong?
Nintendo MAY have been the monopoly in the NES days, but thats debatable due to weak gaming industry at the time. Sega was never in a position to become a monopoly. Neither was Atari. Certainly not (yet) Microsoft considering their market share with the Xbox. But Sony? Square exclusives, a horde of third-party support, enough sports games to keep a gamer busy for a month, and enough market support to shovel crap out and still break even.
You complain about races, but someone made cat and lizard races, you just dismiss it anyways, so clearly races isn't the problem either.
The following is a list of number of non-standard type races in the top 3 MMO games in the U.S., the game their in, what type of creature they are, compared to the number of standard type races and their ratio. Since FFXI's characters/races is purposely reworded and tweaked, I won't use them as an example in this.
Everquest : Number of non-standard races, 3. The Froglok, the Iksar, and the Vah Shir. Number of standard races, 12. Ratio, 1:4. Overall variety : Very bad, considering its not even one-third and the number of expansions its already recieved.
Asheron's Call 2 : Number of non-standard races, 2. The Lugians and the Tumeroks. Number of standard races, 1. Ratio 2:1. Overall variety : Bad, considering theres only 3 races to choose from. Two words : No variety.
Horizons : Number of non-standard races, 4. The Dragons (yes they're in games as monsters but players can FINALLY play as them), the Fiends, the Saris, and the Sslik. Number of standard races, 5. Ratio : 4:5. Overall variety : Good. Your standard bread and butter human-elf-dwarf combo is here while mixing things up (the dragons being the most obvious example).
The PS2 lived up to my expectations. That is poorly.
The hardware is a shoddy piece of crap which was sacrificed to make it backward compatable, which most likely saved it from totally crashing in the first year. Its line of third party developers put out crappy game after crappy game in the beginning since so much time and money was necessary to making a game that could run the PS2. The PS2 was supposed to cut down on load times (which everyone has been bitching about since the PS1 came out) but didn't. The heavy use and reliance on FMVs in games was also beginning to piss off gamers (*cough*MGS2*cough*) since the novelty wore off.
All in all, a complete failure compared to the PS1. Sony can't/couldn't get away from the things that plagued the PS1 this time. Long load times, weak hardware, defective hardware, and poor graphics (FFX and FFX-2 don't count considering the amount of FMVs and time it took to make) were issues never solved. In fact, the PS2 is most like a update rather than an upgrade.
MMO games are in a horrible, horrible rut as it is. With Second Life really being the only one thats experimenting with user made content, the majority of MMO games are stuck using the same ol kill rats, level up, get phat l3wt, sell for real money, repeat. Hell we can't even get more creative characters. We're still using the basic humans, elves, and dwarves combination with a few variants (orcs, trolls, and maybe some cat/lizard race). Even the classes are relatively the same. Healer, close fighter, ranged fighter, wizard, thief..
Companies need to pitch something totally different that'll set them apart from the others. Having weekly events. Set up contests. Have the dev team make their presence known in the game and then give the players a chance to kill them (a la Ultima Online). Come up with a totally different cast of races to play as (humans, elves and dwarves are overdone. Get over it.) Let monsters be proactive, instead of being reactive. Maybe even let monsters roam into town and destroy if players don't kill it. TRY SOMETHING NEW.
MMO games are changing IMO. The problem is by the time they become good enough to earn my money, chances are I'll be playing CS2 and Quake 4.
Games like Final Fantasy? Pfft. They haven't seenen games like Everquest where players form organizations dedicated to killing rats and other animals for the sake of money.
Especially that new Final Fantasy, which lets players auction off animal parts for money!
Slashdot Mirror
Even things regarding a game's difficulty is being gutted. Whens the last time anyone here played the singleplayer mode of any game and actually had trouble with it?
While I think demos are nice and what-not, I think demos shouldn't always put their best foot out. While wearing gold plated shoes. And silver lined socks. Even the original Doom didn't put their BEST foot out. It held back some of the best weapons, levels and monsters. In the case of cases (independent developers), yes a demo can make or break them.
With this in mind, focusing on unmanned drones and whats already been proven is the best course of action. Sure you could get a super stealthy, super armed helicopter fast enough to nearly break the sound barrier. But you can't use it for another 50 years, you can't use it to attack terrorist cells because its weapons would create too much collateral damage, and it can still be taken down by a RPG and a couple hundred rounds of machine gun fire.
And whats to stop EA from buying you out? Businesses are businesses. In the real world, businesses can't say "no we won't sell out our soul for millions of dollars and millions more in budgets". Hell look at Bungie. Everyone bitching about Bungie 'selling out' to Microsoft without a thought as to maybe their FINANCIAL SITUATION. Games cost money to make. These are no longer the days when middle age parents can spend time working in their garage working on the next Doom or Ultima.
If there really were a market or just a desire for out of the mainstream games, and the talent to produce such games, the open source game efforts wouldn't be so pathetic.
Oh I'd love to create an open source game, but you know what? If I'm not getting paid for it, I'm not doing squat. Welcome to the real world, where people have real jobs, real expenses, and real lives. Theres only 24 hours in a day, and I spend over two-thirds of it going to school, studying and sleeping. The other one-third is spent doing housework, working at my job and reading books from the library. What do YOU do with your time?
And your point is?
All the recent Maddens are improved thanks to hardware advances. New playmaker control? Sorry, but before the Playstation, gamers were stuck with a simple D-pad for directional control. Adding two joysticks, doubling the RAM, and using a video card capable of drawing over a dozen players in 3D is a lot more powerful than anything the SNES or the Genesis were capable of. Thats like saying Doom 1 sucked compared to Half-Life because you couldn't look up and down, you couldn't jump, or move crates around. Its called technical limitations. For all we know Pac-Man could've been originally been designed as a 3D, 1st person view game with online multiplayer with humans playing both Pac-Man and the ghosts at the same time but was scrapped because of technical limitations at the time.
Design a stadium and new jerseys? Yeah, lets see you try to do that on 5+ year old hardware.
So hardcore fans makes and sell content to non-hardcore fans, while the developing team makes and sells more content to the hardcore fans, while the producers makes and sells bandwidth and servers to the developing team?
Unless they charge a low price for this type of game, it won't have mass appeal. (Pay a front-end fee, a subscription fee, AND a fee for extra content? Uh, not exactly budget minded.)
Face it, today's games (mods and total conversions don't count) are no longer made in people's garages by developing teams consisting of one person. People don't have the time or money to maintain something as a video game, even one as small as a MUD. There are also other issues at hand, time spent working on the game vs time spent sleeping. Money spent on upgrading the server vs money spent on going to Europe for vacation. Social life vs virtual life. Paying job vs non-paying job. Employment vs unemployment.
Not only that there are management issues. NASA is already going insane trying to keep the two Mars rovers operational and funded. Chances are they're not going to spend a couple extra billion dollars on another planet which gets no PR.
*cough*newbie*cough*
Most older games don't have tutorials. Try picking up a game of Final Fantasy I. No in game instructions, no in game tutorial, no "how-to". (Hell the game was so hard you could get killed before reaching the first boss if you chose a bad party or didn't stock up.) "Experimenting" with a game is a recent thing. If you went to an arcade in the past and (god forbid especially for fighting games) they didn't have printouts explaining how to play the game, you were pretty much throwing money away. Sure you have MAME and whatnot, but when your a 13 year old kid playing on allowance money, YOU WANT YOUR MONEY'S WORTH.
2) Check out sites like GameFAQs. Many of the best written FAQs have instructions on how to play the game in the introductions.
Again, in the past this was certainly not true. While modern connection speeds may make searching GameFAQs seem easier than flipping through a strategy guide, believe it or not there was a time when most gamers didn't know about the existance of GameFAQs (gasp).
3) Pay extra for games with manual (and box if you really want it). Then stores can pay kids selling games extra for their used games with manual (and box) and there will be incentive for them to take care of the product.
Some stores like EBGames already do that. They give you an extra .25 to $5 money for the box and manual. BIG FRIKING DEAL. Considering the most you'll ever make off a trade-in is $30, either way, you get ripped off. And so does the guy who comes in and buys it at $45.
SOME of us like to preserve our childhood. Hell some people like to collect bottlecaps and stamps, what wrong with collecting old video game boxes?
The only difference between gangs (real life ones) and virus writers is the fact that gangs do direct damage whereas virus writers do indirect damage.
Any computer hooked up to the internet could be called an internet server.
How could this make my gaming experience more fun? I know Sony is trying to make an "entertainment system" with the Playstation line (PSX anyone?) but considering the majority of PS2 owners bought it for the games, how is this going to make games more fun?
Will horrible random name generating system be in this game? (For those who don't know, the original UFO Enemy Unknown featured a random name generating system. The problem with it was that first and last names were not seperated so you could have a character names James Jones or Adams Frank. Not only that they didn't seperate names by nationality so you'd have names like... well I'm sure you can think of some crazy combinations. I once played a game where I start off with 3 characters all having the same last name. Family relationship?)
In theory, yes this is true. But in reality, when you go to a public school gym class you got a bare minimum of 15 kids per class (in my high school we used to have 4 groups of kids in each gym class so there was over 100 for me). The end result? You don't have to worry about the gym teacher making fun of you because you don't know the rules of basketball. You got an entire class ready and willing to make fun of you. Worse case scenario, you always get picked last in whatever game you play.. except video games.
But for Joe Average users, the question is : How do you know what you do not 'absolutely need' and therefore need to turn off? As it is, without being a programmer yourself and messing around with Windows yourself, Joe Average isn't going to know what the fuck 'ports' are let alone how to tell which ports are open and how to close them. Sure it may sound like reciting the ABCs for you, but do you REALLY think the majority of the public know what they are let alone know how or why they should close them?
Security is only as good as the person in charge of it. For all Joe Average knows, there could be a program installed in Windows which makes his computer 100% hacker/virus proof but if he doesn't know where it is or how to install it, its useless.
EA should've completely rewritten the non-existant storyline or at least change the sides considering the time of release. (Its post-9/11 and all of the sudden I'm playing a game which lets me get money for killing civilians with anthrax and car bombs? How about no?)
I bet if you took a poll of the best movies of all time of the moviegoers in the United States today
Considering the parent post is referring to Joe Averages who see movies, you argument about movie snobs is moot. And the parent post is probably right. If there was a WIDESPREAD GENERAL PUBLIC poll between Casablanca and the LOTR (any of the three), chances are the LOTR movie would win by a landslide.
I'm looking at my PC's hard drive right now and I don't see how a hard drive could add that much to the physical size of the Xbox. I think Microsoft needs to quit making up excuses and just get hardware companies to make specialized hardware for their system to cutting down on the size. (Just look at the size of the Gamecube. You KNOW it has specialized hardware just by its size.)
Actually in Wing Commander Prophecy (PC version, haven't played the GBA remake), they do something you describe. In one mission, your taking off from the carrier and one of your wingmen in with a different group, already in battle. So what do I do? I hold down the afterburner button only to still be a good 3 minutes away and have him die. Thats not cool, especially considering I tried it about 7 times before realizing it was scripted so you COULDN'T save him.
This was also done in Freespace 2. In one mission you're to intercept and prevent the enemy capital ship from escaping. Naturally, something goes wrong and theres NO WAY you can catch up to it. And goddamnit, that wasn't the only mission in the game where that happened. In a mission after that you have to rescue/capture an enemy transport ship... only to get attacked by 6 HEAVY BOMBERS all scripted to launch torpedoes at virtually point blank range at an already weak target. Talk about lame!
I think the way its already set up is the best as it is. Nice scripted FMVs since it helps move the storyline along the best. There are TONS of examples in games which the player could have totally screwed up the entire storyline if he had control on the character during cutscenes (like you said Max Payne 2 had some examples, theres nearly a million in both MGS games, and theres at least one in every RPG.) At least in FMVs you give the player a sense of "so close, and yet so far" since you COULD do something but you KNOW you at the least shouldn't. If games were adopt your type of scripting, it'd be like "there was nothing you could do" or "even if you did something, would that be for the better?" In Wing Commander 2, you and your wingman is out on a mission to take out a space station. Scripted event : wingman's ship is sabotaged and ends up kamikazing the station. For better or for worse? (You could eject but then you lose the game instantly and your wingman won't return to base/eject.)
So whats next?
I never thought of it that way, but now that you mention it, it IS true. I think people need to realize and remember that in the gaming industry (at least the console industry), Microsoft is the new kid on the block. More than that, hes the geek, the nerd, the kid no one likes, the black sheep, etc. Microsoft may be king of PCs, but when it comes to consoles, Microsoft has to use the Xbox as a money landfill otherwise the Xbox woulda gone the way of the Dreamcast years ago.
Think about it. Slashdot. Microsoft. Not exactly a friendly relationship, its more like a Cold War U.S./U.S.S.R. relationship with both sides having nukes pointed at each other. On the other hand. Slashdot. Sony. Geeks and gadgets, what could go wrong?
Nintendo MAY have been the monopoly in the NES days, but thats debatable due to weak gaming industry at the time. Sega was never in a position to become a monopoly. Neither was Atari. Certainly not (yet) Microsoft considering their market share with the Xbox. But Sony? Square exclusives, a horde of third-party support, enough sports games to keep a gamer busy for a month, and enough market support to shovel crap out and still break even.
The following is a list of number of non-standard type races in the top 3 MMO games in the U.S., the game their in, what type of creature they are, compared to the number of standard type races and their ratio. Since FFXI's characters/races is purposely reworded and tweaked, I won't use them as an example in this.
Everquest : Number of non-standard races, 3. The Froglok, the Iksar, and the Vah Shir. Number of standard races, 12. Ratio, 1:4. Overall variety : Very bad, considering its not even one-third and the number of expansions its already recieved.
Asheron's Call 2 : Number of non-standard races, 2. The Lugians and the Tumeroks. Number of standard races, 1. Ratio 2:1. Overall variety : Bad, considering theres only 3 races to choose from. Two words : No variety.
Horizons : Number of non-standard races, 4. The Dragons (yes they're in games as monsters but players can FINALLY play as them), the Fiends, the Saris, and the Sslik. Number of standard races, 5. Ratio : 4:5. Overall variety : Good. Your standard bread and butter human-elf-dwarf combo is here while mixing things up (the dragons being the most obvious example).
The hardware is a shoddy piece of crap which was sacrificed to make it backward compatable, which most likely saved it from totally crashing in the first year. Its line of third party developers put out crappy game after crappy game in the beginning since so much time and money was necessary to making a game that could run the PS2. The PS2 was supposed to cut down on load times (which everyone has been bitching about since the PS1 came out) but didn't. The heavy use and reliance on FMVs in games was also beginning to piss off gamers (*cough*MGS2*cough*) since the novelty wore off.
All in all, a complete failure compared to the PS1. Sony can't/couldn't get away from the things that plagued the PS1 this time. Long load times, weak hardware, defective hardware, and poor graphics (FFX and FFX-2 don't count considering the amount of FMVs and time it took to make) were issues never solved. In fact, the PS2 is most like a update rather than an upgrade.
Companies need to pitch something totally different that'll set them apart from the others. Having weekly events. Set up contests. Have the dev team make their presence known in the game and then give the players a chance to kill them (a la Ultima Online). Come up with a totally different cast of races to play as (humans, elves and dwarves are overdone. Get over it.) Let monsters be proactive, instead of being reactive. Maybe even let monsters roam into town and destroy if players don't kill it. TRY SOMETHING NEW.
MMO games are changing IMO. The problem is by the time they become good enough to earn my money, chances are I'll be playing CS2 and Quake 4.
Especially that new Final Fantasy, which lets players auction off animal parts for money!