On point 3: Lag is always a problem, but games like Phantasy Star Universe show that you can include some level of real-time interaction. Of course, you can't have enormous battles because of the lag issue, but you CAN have "I push a button, my avatar swings his sword" as well as "I can dodge arrows if I move fast enough". Enough people have broadband to create a sustainable market, although losing dial-up members always hurts.
It's interesting you mention "choose-your-own-adventure" books (which were a lot of fun; why'd they stop making them?), because very few games praised for their story are actually like those. In a CYOA book, you could have ten completely different stories in one book; in your average story-driven game, you have one story with a few different endings.
Final Fantasy VII is completely linear- nothing you did would change the story (okay, you could date three different girls in a subquest). Even games with multiple endings, like the Star Ocean series, tend to make all the changes at the very end. The games most remembered for their divergence, like the Fallout series, are rarely made and are apparently unprofitable... it's a real shame. As for sandbox games like GTA, they like to let the player mess aronud, but then force them to continue the rigid story eventually.
So yes, I haven't seen a game story that couldn't have been made into a book or movie. I look forward to the day they make one.
You're assuming that there are limited gameplay possibilities, but unlimited (or extremely large) story possibilities. I'd argue the exact opposite: story possibilities have been hashed out through books and movies, while gameplay is unique to video games and is still very new.
I have yet to see a story in a game that couldn't have been told in a book or a movie... some have been done very well and I've enjoyed those immensely, but many seem to become "hunt the cutscene", with boring gameplay designed only to get you to the next pretty picture. Gameplay is the core of all video games, but people have settled for bland gaming with "interesting" stories.
"Challenge for its own sake" may have been done before- that's chess. But just like how chess isn't Street Fighter 2, there's no reason to believe that challenge-based games will be boring, "even if it's been done a million times".
And they don't have to be multiplayer to be interesting. I can still pick up Robotron or Pac-Man and enjoy it. However, I can't replay the old great Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games, even though I played the hell out of them when they came out.
If Jaffe can come up with something innovative, it'll last far longer than a game with standard gameplay and a decent story.
Yes, it is "OK". It's also "OK" for everyone else to create a complex system of police officers, judges, and wardens to stuff you in jail for a while. If you feel like being a fugitive for the rest of your life, well, that's really up to you.
You're confusing moral OK with physical OK. Games have very little moral OK in them, because the whole point of many games is to avoid moral questions. Did you ever think being a freelance warrior who randomly kills people he arbitrarily decides are enemies might be a little immoral? In real life, sure- but in a game where certain people are ALWAYS the enemy and killing the enemy is a fine way to gain money and respect, people should adjust their moral outrage levels appropriately.
A cellphone MMOG makes a lot of sense because it's a casual gaming market. This could attract people who don't even think of games beyond Minesweeper or Solitare- a simple MMOG could make a tidy profit off a 10-minutes-a-day player market.
We've come to think of MMOGs as giant timesinks, but they don't have to be. The long hours of grind aren't required, they're just lazy game design. All you really need is to keep the player paying every month; if Carmack makes a successful MMOG with no grind, he'll deserve every penny.
Besides, they could always port it to DS/PSP if it did well.
The PS2 is the video game console guaranteed to be in more homes than any other game machine, period. Making a game for it still makes sense, especially since the PS3 will supposedly be backwards compatible.
I'm betting they'll make "SC3 Championship Edition" or something for next-gen consoles in a little while, just to milk the series.
According to the article, they've only made minor changes: guard impact went back to SC1 controls, and the playfield is smaller to force more 8-way run. Most hardcore SC players I know hated the simpler guard impact system, so this is welcome news.
Basically, it sounds like SC3 is really just the best of SC1 and SC2, as well as a lot of new modes. No complaints here.
On the contrary, "modern society" could not exist without computer programs. The level of complexity required to run the stock market, handle credit card databases, and maintain cell phone networks requires people that can seriously program. We don't even have to get that complex- just consider ATMs.
The big difference between our opinions lies in how we define "modern society". If you're talking about the 1950s or so, computers were obviously not necessary; however, I'd argue that many crucial tasks like food and resource distribution (getting raw materials to factories) rely on modern computing programs. Not to mention the levels of safety; would you want 1950s-era planes carting modern-day levels of freight without modern air traffic control?
Wow, a "man i hate teh Animez" post gets "Interesting". I'm also glad we have such an expert on anime here who has seen every bit of it ever made, thus being able to distinguish between Miyazaki's and everyone else's works.
"Anime" is a term just like "movie"; it's based off facts about the film, not subjective quality. Should we call Citizen Kane something besides "movie" just because so many other movies suck? Some anime is terrible, some isn't. Deal with it.
In EVE Online, death debt was similar to CoH, only it had a real-life timer attached. So if you died, you could either work off the debt the usual way or wait X hours for it to go away, online OR OFFLINE.
I've become a seriously casual player of CoH these days, and I'd find such a system nice for making sure I don't spend a week paying for an error. I'm just wondering whether such "real-time debt" systems have been considered for CoH.
Is there a lot of badly animated anime? Of course, just like there are a lot of low-budget TV shows (Attention BBC: please try spending money on your sets someday). That _doesn't_ mean that a) ALL anime is badly animated, or that b) it's not worth watching.
Also, I know you didn't indicate b), but I had to stick that in after making fun of the BBC.
I find it hard to believe that comic books will disappear entirely: they're a medium that can't be fully absorbed by any other medium. Books and radio don't have the instant information of pictures; pictures don't have the descriptive possibilities of words; pictures with speech (i.e. movies) have all the problems of speech- hard to make a "quick read" (the mind works and the eye scans far faster than any person can reasonably speak).
Even when everyone has some super-PDA that can play movies as casually as we read a pamphlet, comics will have a place. It's like radio- TV took a big slice out of it, so it simply shifted its market.
(Nitpick disclaimer: I'm not saying any of these mediums _can't_ do the things I except them from, I'm saying they tend to do them less efficiently.)
1. If we accept the idea of building a whole bunch of humanoid robots in the first place, it might actually make sense to go back to primitive forms of construction. The only reason to build a humanoid robot in the first place is to let it do everything a human can, but better (more strength, longer runtime, less worker's comp). So spending billions on high-tech construction machinery wouldn't make sense after already spending billions on the robots. Plus, those primitive forms of construction worked really well when you had an army of slaves to do them with.
2. The Matrix may not be the first or best telling of the whole "virtual world/prison" idea, but it has something really big going for it- general public acceptance. The Wachowski brothers have basically done what Shakespeare did for his work- taken a pretty good story idea and added some flashy stuff to please the less intelligently inclined. That way, not only are both the brainiacs and the jocks pleased, they can actually TALK to each other. Imagine trying to talk about a Matrix-like world to the TV-only crowd by saying "you know, like Philip K. Dick wrote about once". The best you'd get is "hehe, you said Dick". Now that we have guns it keeps their attention.
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On point 3: Lag is always a problem, but games like Phantasy Star Universe show that you can include some level of real-time interaction. Of course, you can't have enormous battles because of the lag issue, but you CAN have "I push a button, my avatar swings his sword" as well as "I can dodge arrows if I move fast enough". Enough people have broadband to create a sustainable market, although losing dial-up members always hurts.
Competition, of course. Maybe Microsoft will release new (and better) OSes on time when faced with a serious competitor.
Hey, it worked for Intel/AMD.
It's interesting you mention "choose-your-own-adventure" books (which were a lot of fun; why'd they stop making them?), because very few games praised for their story are actually like those. In a CYOA book, you could have ten completely different stories in one book; in your average story-driven game, you have one story with a few different endings.
Final Fantasy VII is completely linear- nothing you did would change the story (okay, you could date three different girls in a subquest). Even games with multiple endings, like the Star Ocean series, tend to make all the changes at the very end. The games most remembered for their divergence, like the Fallout series, are rarely made and are apparently unprofitable... it's a real shame. As for sandbox games like GTA, they like to let the player mess aronud, but then force them to continue the rigid story eventually.
So yes, I haven't seen a game story that couldn't have been made into a book or movie. I look forward to the day they make one.
You're assuming that there are limited gameplay possibilities, but unlimited (or extremely large) story possibilities. I'd argue the exact opposite: story possibilities have been hashed out through books and movies, while gameplay is unique to video games and is still very new.
I have yet to see a story in a game that couldn't have been told in a book or a movie... some have been done very well and I've enjoyed those immensely, but many seem to become "hunt the cutscene", with boring gameplay designed only to get you to the next pretty picture. Gameplay is the core of all video games, but people have settled for bland gaming with "interesting" stories.
Did "finishing" even matter? Should it?
"Challenge for its own sake" may have been done before- that's chess. But just like how chess isn't Street Fighter 2, there's no reason to believe that challenge-based games will be boring, "even if it's been done a million times".
And they don't have to be multiplayer to be interesting. I can still pick up Robotron or Pac-Man and enjoy it. However, I can't replay the old great Lucasarts/Sierra adventure games, even though I played the hell out of them when they came out.
If Jaffe can come up with something innovative, it'll last far longer than a game with standard gameplay and a decent story.
Yes, it is "OK". It's also "OK" for everyone else to create a complex system of police officers, judges, and wardens to stuff you in jail for a while. If you feel like being a fugitive for the rest of your life, well, that's really up to you.
You're confusing moral OK with physical OK. Games have very little moral OK in them, because the whole point of many games is to avoid moral questions. Did you ever think being a freelance warrior who randomly kills people he arbitrarily decides are enemies might be a little immoral? In real life, sure- but in a game where certain people are ALWAYS the enemy and killing the enemy is a fine way to gain money and respect, people should adjust their moral outrage levels appropriately.
A cellphone MMOG makes a lot of sense because it's a casual gaming market. This could attract people who don't even think of games beyond Minesweeper or Solitare- a simple MMOG could make a tidy profit off a 10-minutes-a-day player market.
We've come to think of MMOGs as giant timesinks, but they don't have to be. The long hours of grind aren't required, they're just lazy game design. All you really need is to keep the player paying every month; if Carmack makes a successful MMOG with no grind, he'll deserve every penny.
Besides, they could always port it to DS/PSP if it did well.
The PS2 is the video game console guaranteed to be in more homes than any other game machine, period. Making a game for it still makes sense, especially since the PS3 will supposedly be backwards compatible. I'm betting they'll make "SC3 Championship Edition" or something for next-gen consoles in a little while, just to milk the series.
According to the article, they've only made minor changes: guard impact went back to SC1 controls, and the playfield is smaller to force more 8-way run. Most hardcore SC players I know hated the simpler guard impact system, so this is welcome news.
Basically, it sounds like SC3 is really just the best of SC1 and SC2, as well as a lot of new modes. No complaints here.
On the contrary, "modern society" could not exist without computer programs. The level of complexity required to run the stock market, handle credit card databases, and maintain cell phone networks requires people that can seriously program. We don't even have to get that complex- just consider ATMs.
The big difference between our opinions lies in how we define "modern society". If you're talking about the 1950s or so, computers were obviously not necessary; however, I'd argue that many crucial tasks like food and resource distribution (getting raw materials to factories) rely on modern computing programs. Not to mention the levels of safety; would you want 1950s-era planes carting modern-day levels of freight without modern air traffic control?
If the good doctor were to suddenly die in the next four years, I'd start lining my baseball caps.
Wow, a "man i hate teh Animez" post gets "Interesting". I'm also glad we have such an expert on anime here who has seen every bit of it ever made, thus being able to distinguish between Miyazaki's and everyone else's works.
"Anime" is a term just like "movie"; it's based off facts about the film, not subjective quality. Should we call Citizen Kane something besides "movie" just because so many other movies suck? Some anime is terrible, some isn't. Deal with it.
In EVE Online, death debt was similar to CoH, only it had a real-life timer attached. So if you died, you could either work off the debt the usual way or wait X hours for it to go away, online OR OFFLINE.
I've become a seriously casual player of CoH these days, and I'd find such a system nice for making sure I don't spend a week paying for an error. I'm just wondering whether such "real-time debt" systems have been considered for CoH.
Is there a lot of badly animated anime? Of course, just like there are a lot of low-budget TV shows (Attention BBC: please try spending money on your sets someday). That _doesn't_ mean that a) ALL anime is badly animated, or that b) it's not worth watching.
Also, I know you didn't indicate b), but I had to stick that in after making fun of the BBC.
I find it hard to believe that comic books will disappear entirely: they're a medium that can't be fully absorbed by any other medium. Books and radio don't have the instant information of pictures; pictures don't have the descriptive possibilities of words; pictures with speech (i.e. movies) have all the problems of speech- hard to make a "quick read" (the mind works and the eye scans far faster than any person can reasonably speak).
Even when everyone has some super-PDA that can play movies as casually as we read a pamphlet, comics will have a place. It's like radio- TV took a big slice out of it, so it simply shifted its market.
(Nitpick disclaimer: I'm not saying any of these mediums _can't_ do the things I except them from, I'm saying they tend to do them less efficiently.)
Two things:
1. If we accept the idea of building a whole bunch of humanoid robots in the first place, it might actually make sense to go back to primitive forms of construction. The only reason to build a humanoid robot in the first place is to let it do everything a human can, but better (more strength, longer runtime, less worker's comp). So spending billions on high-tech construction machinery wouldn't make sense after already spending billions on the robots. Plus, those primitive forms of construction worked really well when you had an army of slaves to do them with.
2. The Matrix may not be the first or best telling of the whole "virtual world/prison" idea, but it has something really big going for it- general public acceptance. The Wachowski brothers have basically done what Shakespeare did for his work- taken a pretty good story idea and added some flashy stuff to please the less intelligently inclined. That way, not only are both the brainiacs and the jocks pleased, they can actually TALK to each other. Imagine trying to talk about a Matrix-like world to the TV-only crowd by saying "you know, like Philip K. Dick wrote about once". The best you'd get is "hehe, you said Dick". Now that we have guns it keeps their attention.