Unfortunately, it's still very much alive and out there. The parents PC contracts it regularly (my dad has appalling security and browsing habits). A friend of mine (who I generally regard as more IT literate than I am) just spent a weekend cleaning an infection of it off his (fully-updated, Macafee-profected) Windows machine.
And now for a gratuitous side-rant:
The source of my friend's infection was apparently a minor video-hosting site carrying game-walkthroughs. On balance, I believe him on this, because I'd had warnings from AVG about such sites myself in the past.
The trend over the last few years has been for game-walkthroughs to shift from text-format to long sequences of videos. Personally, I hate, loathe and despise this trend from a convenience point of view (try searching 30 videos for how to find that pesky item you're missing, compared to doing a quick search on a text file). But it's had some other unpleasant side effects.
See by default, these videos go on youtube. Thing is, however, game publishers sometimes object to complete video walkthroughs of their games being hosted there and do DMCA takedowns. So the videos then crop up on less notable video-hosting sites. Many of which appear to be malware infested hellholes.
So the moral of my (horribly off-topic) side rant: video walkthroughs suck. They're difficult to search, they're inevitably narrated by some idiot called "Tad" who feels the need to say how stoned he is roughly every 30 seconds and - they're turning into a really horrible malware vector.
But there's another, related lesson in all of this; one that's more for businesses than consumers. The irony is, it's not a new lesson; it's one that has been well known for decades (centuries?), but which seems to have been forgotten recently in a good chunk of the gaming industry.
That lesson is: "Your brands matter. Protect their value."
I'm sure that on one level, EA understands this. In fact, I suspect a few parts of the company (mainly those who handle its cash-cow sports titles, which remain well-received and commercially successful) understand it very well. It spends a fortune on advertising. It's known to throw its weight around when major releases get lackluster reviews. But at the same time, it has worked very hard in recent years to take some of the most potent brand names in gaming and drag them through the mud. And then set fire to them. And then take a dump on the remains.
A few examples: their acquisition of Bioware looked at the time like a bit of reputation control. Their name was in the crapper, so they tried to associate themselves with the halo surrounding one of the most highly regarded developers in the business. However, with Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, that brand very quickly ended up tarnished. Now, views will vary on EA's responsibility for that (personal view; extensive in the case of Dragon Age 2, but Mass Effect 3's failings felt mostly inflicted by people within Bioware). It wasn't just the disappointing games either; the day-1 DLC, starting from the original Dragon Age onwards (and I'd never accuse that game of being disappointing) did a lot to erode consumer good will and cement a reputation for nickel-and-diming customers who had purchased already expensive games. In fact, many of the post-launch DLC packs for EA/Bioware games have been good value, but the reputational damage is done by the day-1 stuff.
Or take Command & Conquer; one of the absolutely core franchises in the history of PC gaming. Actually, EA's history here is more complicated than it might appear. Westwood had itself done all it possibly could to tarnish this brand, with C&C2 and Red Alert 2, both of which felt years behind the curve at the point of release. EA's first move on acquiring the franchise was a bit odd and bewildering - sticking the name onto Generals - a title that clearly had little to do with Command & Conquer (which isn't to say that it was bad, just that it didn't look or feel like a C&C game). However, EA then seemed to buck its ideas up; C&C3 and Red Alert 3 were both, in their own ways, high quality titles and felt like a return to grace for the series. So what a pity that the usual EA self-destructive tendencies were allowed to take over; C&C4 was clearly rushed to release and was crippled by barely-functional always-online DRM. Since then, all we've seen has been some craptacular gestures towards the pay-to-win market.
And then there's SimCity. I won't dwell on this at length; the discussion is live across many, many gaming sites at the moment. But again, EA has taken a loved and respected franchise and smeared it in excrement. In fact, in this case, EA's reputation was already bad enough that I didn't make the mistake of buying this title.
The result of this? At one point, Bioware games - and games with the C&C or SimCity name on them - would have been guaranteed purchases for me (and, I suspect, for a lot of other people). As of now, though, I would sniff carefully around the reviews of a Bioware game, and wouldn't touch a C&C or a SimCity with a barge pole. The brand value has been substantially diminished or outright destroyed. There are other examples too; I loved the old (early 2000s) Medal of Honor games - but the first of EA's recent reboots was grim enough that I didn't touch its sequel and they've now canned the franchise again because a lot of other people clearly felt the same.
Funny thing is, EA aren't (quite) the worst in the industry at this. Dire though they are, I don't th
Perhaps one day we'll have Star Trek style holodecks. And that will be great. Until the point - roughly 10 minutes after the first trial - when people realise that if they're really bad at running around doing atheletic stuff in real life, they're also going to be really bad at it on a holodeck like that.
I think controllers which try to make games more immersive by having them mimic real life activities are (with a few exceptions I'll touch on later) missing the point.
That isn't to say that games shouldn't try to be immersive and that controllers don't have a role to play in immersion. However, given that in most games, the player is doing things he wouldn't be able to do in real life, simply trying to translate real-life controls into the game isn't going to work. In most genres, the best thing the controls can do is let the player forget that they are there at all. They need to be the most efficient means possible of translating the player's will into the behaviour of his on-screen avatar.
Every time a player dies (or otherwise fails, depending on genre) in game due to control issues, the immersion is broken. I can think of some really awful examples here, going back decades. Remember Ultima VIII, as it was at launch? Those jumps across the moving platforms, where a mis-step meant death? Remember how you could see precisely what you needed to do to get across, but how the atrocious point and click control inputs made each and every jump an exercise in trial, error and sheer luck? And remember how much it broke the immersion every time you failed - reminded you that you weren't the Avatar exploring a strange land, but a player wrestling with a cumbersome interface and control system? That one was bad enough that they eventually patched it (turning it from "atrocious" to "just about tolerable").
Or more recently, take the Super Mario Galaxy games. I enjoyed both of these immensely - until the point at which it became necessary to use the spin-jump to make certain jumps. See, "spin jump" was mapped to "waggle the Wii-mote". And "waggle" is not, on a Wii-mote, a precise input. There's actually a good bit of variation in just how much and how hard you need to waggle before the game will accept that, yes, you have waggled (and I can't believe I've just typed that sentence). So all of a sudden you have a precision platformer which is dependant upon a non-precision input. And even though it's only for one single input, each time you rack up an unnecessary death due to that input going wrong, the immersion is broken.
Or sometimes a game uses a "normal" input device, but because the game adapts itself to that device badly, it still ends up feeling broken. Resident Evil 6 is a case in point here. I've played this on the 360 and the PC and found the 360 version effectively unplayable, due to control issues. I don't normally object to playing shooters on a console controller (though I'd prefer mouse and keyboard), but the shooters in question need to make concessions to the fact that they're being played on a device less suited to precise aim. Actually, many console shooters these days do that well; snap-to aim, relatively generous hitboxes and slow-moving enemies may not always make for the most exciting game mechanics, but they do take a lot of the pain out of playing a shooter on a console controller. Resident Evil 6 makes no such concessions; in a game where only headshots do appreciable damage to enemies, aiming at these tiny, fast bobbing targets on a console controller is nigh impossible and the abiding impression I took away from my 360 version was that my in-game character actually had worse accuracy with a gun than I myself would in real life (which is saying something). After that, playing with mouse and keyboard on the PC was a complete revelation - while the game itself still has flaws, it was an order of magnitude better than the console version. By contrast, the recent Tomb Raider reboot makes such good concessions to aiming on a controller that I played it on PC using a 360 control
There's also the point that, in my opinion at least, IE has closed the gap with the other browsers quite a bit in recent years. I'd been using Firefox since 2004, but had grown increasingly irritated with a number of its quirks and foibles.
Got a new PC a couple of weeks ago and decided that was a good spur to check around and see how other browsers measured up. Having done so (and slightly through gritted teeth), I actually settled on IE.
Five years ago, somebody who was using IE was either ignorant or browsing from an office PC where they had no choice. I just don't think that's the case any more.
I wonder if the controller issue is driven by a desire for regional standardisation. There's a general consensus (wonder if it's actually true?) that Japanese gamers prefer a smaller controller and US gamers prefer a larger one (though obviously not one as large as the original Xbox controller). As a Japanese company, Sony will always be more exposed to feedback from its home market.
But yes, while I'm generally positive about the PS4 reveal, the controller does stand out as a bit of a sore-point.
The 360 offering is substantially less attractive than it was two years ago. The new "third gen" dashboard UI is a big step back from the previous one. It's not just the sheer quantity of advertising, but also the irritation and number of navigations involved in trying to get to actual game content. Bizarrely, it's also a worse UI to navigate using Kinnect gesture/voice controls than the old "second gen" dashboard was.
The other issue, of course, is that while many frustrations remain around the PS3, Sony have raised their game in some respects. The PS Store is much better now than it used to be (admittedly that's a low bar) and PS Plus is actually a genuinely good service for people who don't have a massive amount to spend on games and don't care about always having the latest titles available, but just want a steady stream of games to play.
The controller issue, of course, is very real. The Sixaxis was awful and while the Dualshock 3 is better, it still has big drawbacks next to the 360 controller. It's too small for many people (including me), it offers poor grip and the shoulder buttons lack the precise analogue sensitivity of the 360 equivalent's.
And don't even get me started on mandatory game installs, patches and goddam firmware updates. At least Sony have realised that particular situation cannot continue on the PS4.
I think the other point that dropped out of the discussion in this particular case (though plenty of people have brought it up elsewhere) is that people don't so much fear always-online requirements because they're worried their net connect might blip out (though that's a perfectly fair concern), but rather because they can see the thin end of the wedge approaching and recognise always-online as a direct underpinning for blocks on used games and rentals.
MS may be getting a lot of pressure from game developers to implement those blocks, but to do so would be absolutely suicidal given customers have a choice to jump to an unrestricted PS4 instead.
I'd have to disagree with you on the gap between console and top-tier PC visuals. Bioshock Infinite isn't as PC-optimised as some games out there, but I found the contrast between the PC version and the 360 version (which seems to be running on loop in my local game store) pretty huge. For something like Crysis 3, it's hard to believe that the PC version is even the same game (though it is an absolute system killer). In that case, I'd say the difference is not far off "Quake 2 software vs Quake 2 opengl".
"Gamers and developers aside" is an absolutely huge qualification. If you're leaving that aside, you may well be missing a big chunk of the reason for the decline in "home" PC sales.
Until somewhere around the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, PC and console game development existed, for the most part, in separate worlds. Games which appeared in both worlds were the exception rather than the norm. But sometime in the middle of the last decade, rising development costs meant that cross-platform development increasingly became the norm.
Until that point, PC game system requirements had progressed on a kind of steady evolutionary curve; you really needed an upgrade every 2 years (maybe 3 at a pinch with some interim upgrades) or so just to be able to run the latest titles at all. Hell, you can more or less track the history of the PC update curve from looking at a few key titles; Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Wing Commander 3, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 (for example).
With PC game development linked at the hip to console game development, the hardware cycle doesn't work like that any more. The PS2/Xbox/Gamecube cycle wasn't too bad; it was a pretty short cycle and by the time PC development really started to get locked in with it, people were already talking about the successors.
But what we're in now is pretty much the longest console cycle we've seen (and it won't truly end until the PS3 launch at the end of this year - the Wii-U is definitely not next-gen in hardware terms). It's absolutely no coincidence that, until very recently, the iconic question about whether a PC will cut the mustard in gaming terms was "will it run Crysis". The original Crysis - a rare game not locked to the console cycle - was released in late 2007. Until very recently, it was still the most demanding PC game around, if you wanted to run it on max settings. A Crysis-capable PC in 2007 cost a lot of money; but by around 2009 or so, you could get the equivalent in the sub-$1000 range. With that PC, you could run pretty much anything released on max settings. System requirements did a small amount of very gradual upward drift, as developers learned the console hardware and were able to do slightly more ambitious things on it; but compared to the preceding decade, it was negligible.
This has started to change a bit recently; as we get into the very late stages of this console cycle, developers do start to push the PC versions of their games significantly beyond what the consoles can do - largely because they want the practice for next-gen development. I think I first noticed it with Bulletstorm - it wasn't huge on that, but it was clear that this was a game whose PC visuals were being optimised beyond what we'd become accustomed to. Battlefield 3 went quite a lot further (it is depressing that spunkgargleweewee tends to be the go-to genre for pushing system specs these days). More recently, the PC versions of Crysis 3 and (to a slightly lesser extent) Tomb Raider have felt like what we should expect to see from next-gen console games - and if you want to run them in max detail, then they do have much more demanding system requirements than what we've become accustomed to.
I'd expect to see PC sales (to home users) rise again over the next couple of years, as we get an upward lurch in system requirements to fit with next-gen console game development.
Christ almighty. You really are utterly fucking thick.
You must have missed the part where I said I lived in London and had a perfectly good net connection myself.
Judging by the stats you quote, I'm guessing you also missed the part where I said that I was primarily talking about parts of the world other than the US and Western Europe.
But don't let that get in the way of a good angry rant.
£60/month covers broadband, phone (including all calls except international) and TV package. Not cheap, not extortionate either. If you live in the right area, the UK's actually very good for broadband. The problem is that most of the country doesn't count as "the right area" yet.
I'm not in the US, so maybe I'm missing some context here, but...
How on earth are either of the links you've just posted examples of hate speech? The first is a line on the abortion debate that we've seen many times over the years. I'm not going to pick sides in that one; but if you approach the debate (as some people do) with the starting point that foes "life begins at conception" then abortion is infanticide. I think a lot of the lack of civility around that particular debate stems from the fact that neither side recognises just how high the stakes feel for the other side in it.
The second link is a fairly silly take on the gun control debate that somehow slides into an odd reductio ab absurdum take on the gay marriage debate. But again, incoherent though it is, is it really hate speech?
If somebody says "All members of (ethnic group x/social group y) are scum! Let's (kill them/throw them out of our country/deprive them of their property rights)" then that feels like hate speech. That's a hell of a long way from either of the examples you link to.
As a test, let's take an example from a left-wing perspective of somebody linking a (generally supported - the UK public consistently backs a tougher line on welfare in polls) Government policy to murder. In this case, it's the murder of the disabled rather than the infanticide, but I think that's still pretty emotive. So: from the UK's Guardian newspaper. Is that hate speech?
If you answer "yes", at least you're consistent. If your answer is no, then it looks more like you're just demonstrating totalitarian instincts to suppress speech that goes against your own values.
If you own MS shares and the launch a console with an "always on" requirement - SELL. Don't even wait for the end of the press conference.
It's not the reaction of the slashdot market you need to worry about. Will we cry foul over such a requirement? Yes. Will we be less likely to buy the console as a result? Yes. Are we a drop in the ocean? No.
Rather, it's the huge "hinterland" demographic, particularly outside the coastal US and Western Europe, that you should be concerned about. If you think that internet connections are as reliable and "always on" as the electricity supply in most of the world, then think again. Personally, I'm pretty lucky; I live in the suburbs of London and have a pretty meaty 120mbit downstream 12 mbit upstream connection with no monthly cap. But even here, reliability isn't perfect - in the 12 months since I moved into this place, I've had two serious broadband faults; that's actually better than the reliability of my old 6mbit downstream 0.5mbit upstream connection in my old place.
Get outside of the major cities and, even in the US and Western Europe, broadband connections become a lot patchier. Moreover, people who don't fall quite so far towards the nerdy end of the spectrum as I do are more likely to be on cheaper broadband packages with restrictive monthly caps; an always on device which is doing anything more than pinging status back and forward could be a major inconvenience for them.
Oh, and then you get some pretty developed parts of the world, particularly out around the Pacific Rim, where home broadband is still fairly limited (sometimes associated with ultra-high-density housing) and most net activity takes place in internet cafes.
If MS announces an always-on console, you can take that as a declaration that it's not interested in competing in those markets.
If the always-on connection is linked to restrictions on the use of used games, then you can take that as a declaration that it's not interested in competing in ANY markets.
There's a lot to dislike about Sony's record. Seriously - a lot (do I even need to say this on slashdot?). But thanks to unbelievable levels of stupidity from both MS and Nintendo, the PS4 is heading to win the next round of the console wars by default, simply by following a low-key, low-risk approach (PC-like architecture, no always-on, no used-games-restrictions, no expensive tablet controller pushing developers into territory they don't want to bother with).
Iain Banks has written some really excellent stuff. I suspect that three of his works in particular will grow in stature and recognition over time; the Wasp Factory, Player of Games and Use of Weapons. The former is a fascinating (and seductively sympathetic) portrait of evil (or perhaps just insanity). The latter two are among the best examples of "intellectual" sci-fi. They use their sci-fi backdrops to tell stories which just wouldn't work in a more mundane setting, but touch on themes and ideas of much broader significance.
I suspect that in a couple of decades time, they'll be held on at least an equivalent level to that to which Frank Herbert's Dune is elevated today. It would be nice to think that they might go further and gain a reputation outside of the science fiction genre.
I'd agree with the comments here. To add a few things to it: the combat is marginally better than Bioshock 1 and 2. My biggest issue with those games was that the weapons lacked any sense of clout. You'd have an enemy charging you who was basically a psychotic human (no armour, no supernatural powers) and to take them down, you'd have to pump multiple clips of ammo into them. That just felt poor. Infinite has, so far (in normal difficulty) felt better in this regard. Not perfect, but better.
The two-weapon limitation is a step back for the series. Very, very few shooters are improved by two weapon limits. Makes sense for realism-heavy military shooters (Operation Flashpoint, ARMA etc), in anything else it just forces bad game design. "Oh look, there's a sniper rifle over there, the game is telling me I will need to snipe in the next sequence". By all means do what Borderlands and its sequel do and, for console control-convenience, have 4 hotswitch weapon slots manageable at any time by your (much larger) inventory. But absolute 2-weapon limits are the absolute worst trend in fps gaming over the last few years.
The story is good. I must say that, as with the original Bioshock, I suspect it's not quite as good as some of the reviews have made out. In particular, I don't think the political and moral dimensions are quite as sophisticated as they claim to be. It's all a bit... well... undergraduate. The first game was "Ayn Rand is bad!". This one is less sophisticated still "Racism is bad!". I actually thought the second game tried to be a little more sophisticated and grey-shaded, but that had the least rapturous reception of any installment in the series.
And on the technology front... I'm running on an i7-3820 (3.6ghz) and an Nvidia 680 in ultra detail. The graphics are very good - better than the console versions. However, they're not better than the console versions by the same margin as we've seen in Crysis 3 or (to a slightly lesser extent) Tomb Raider. With those games, it felt like the PC version had been developed to a level that was in-line with what we should expect from the PS4 and the 360-successor. The PC version here is more halfway-house-ish.
Slight digression on Crysis 3; I was discussing it with a colleague at work who does all of his gaming on the 360. He was really disappointed with the game, largely because of its campaign length. I came to it's defense "But look at the technology, this is next-gen stuff, so it's no surprise that other elements of the game got a bit squeezed, just as happened with the likes of the original Gears of War early in this cycle". His response "What technology? It looks just like Crysis 2."
A day or two later, I got to see the 360 version running on a demonstration machine in my local Game.
"Oh, so he wasn't even playing the same game as me."
The option of manual saves should be a mandatory certification requirement in shooters. There may be other genres where it doesn't fit, but for shooters it's an absolute no brainer.
My personal absolute least favorite trick ever is the one where you get to the end of a campaign mission in a shooter, watch a lengthy cutscene and then... it doesn't do a save until you've actually moved a way into the next mission. So if you survived the encounter at the end of the previous mission, sat watching your clock through a lengthy cutscene while thinking "I really need to go now" and then quit as soon as you get out of cutscene... you have to do that final encounter and cutscene all over again the next time you play. No idea whether Bioshock Infinite does this, but other titles, including some in the Gears of War and Resident Evil series certainly have.
I think the question "do video games contain good writing?" is probably not the right one to be asking. Or at least, not the relevant one for this discussion.
Of course there are games which contain good - even great - writing. Star Control 2, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, Final Fantasies 6, 7 and 10, the entire Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series, most of the Mass Effect series - to list just a few.
However, the common factor surrounding these games is that they all fall into the category of what would be described (usually with a heavy smearing of condescension) as "genre" fiction in other media.
Does this matter? To most people, no. I'm perfectly happy to walk out of a bookstore with a sci-fi or fantasy novel, or to sit down and watch a Western on the TV. I don't think I'm alone (or even in a particular minority) in that. But there is a prominent cultural clique that is consistently unwilling to recognise "genre" fiction as inferior and not quite "art".
You can see it in the film world at the Oscars - sci-fi and fantasy find it very, very difficult to get a fair shot at the "big" awards. Occasionally something from the "genre" stable becomes big enough that it can't be ignored (Lord of the Rings), but by and large, the winners come from a very narrow pool. You can see every year that you get a group of films which are going Oscar-fishing. The trends have changed a bit over time (a few decades ago, you'd have needed to be a musical, but these days gloomy biopics are the way to go), but the existence of a fairly narrow category that is seen as intrinsically worthier has been consistent over time.
It's the same with the big mainstream literary awards - if anything, it's even harder for "genre" fiction to break through there (and a very, very small pool of authors tend to clean up year after year). A part of me thinks that the Hugo awards and the like should retaliate by having a "best mundane fiction" category, to recognise "the work which best overcomes its limitations of a serious lack of imagination to nevertheless be tolerably readable". I bet Martin Amis would be really proud of one of those.
I don't really see how video-games can break out of the genre box. It's a medium that's based around player-interaction, which is always going to push it towards a heavy focus on plot (generally one of the defining traits of much genre fiction). The question isn't whether video-games need to break out of that niche; it's whether we actually care if they do so.
I think people are overcomplicating this departure. I'd be surprised if it had the slightest thing to do with the latest upsets involving the company (SimCity and Real Racing 3). Rather, I think the share price decline - and hence the departure - is being driven by one very simple thing.
Forget all the "free to play" and "pay to win" crap. Investors know where the money in gaming is right now. It's in spunkgargleweewee. They look at Activision's profits from Call of Duty and think "I want a bit of that".
Until late last year, EA had a story to tell on this. The Medal of Honor reboot did ok. Not brilliantly, but ok. It got a foot in the door. Battlefield 3 did a bit more than that. It did quite well; it got a lot of the casual spunkgargleweewee drinker crowd playing because it tickled their tastebuds and it got a good degree of core-game interest because it was clear that the tech powering it was likely to be the starting point for the next console generation.
But then Medal of Honor: Warfighter happened. Crap marketing. Crap game. Profoundly negative appeal (for all sorts of cultural reasons) to the non-US market. Critical disaster. Commercial disaster.
Suddenly, EA no longer has a story to tell its investors on spunkgargleweewee. In this most important of markets, the graph no longer trends upwards.
That, more than anything else, will be what has driven this. Not proactive consumer boycotts. Not online protests. But the fact that their spunkgargleweewee ended up as a disappointment.
Wings of Liberty has a campaign that takes around 20 hours, plus a few "skirmish" modes and multiplayer.
Heart of the Swarm has a campaign that - going off early reports - is around the same length as WoL's. It is built on the same engine, so fewer development costs there. However, it has entirely new cinematics, voice work etc (a good chunk of the costs), new mission design and a radically designed multiplayer.
As a standalone, Wings of Liberty is roughly equivalent value to... say... the original Dawn of War, at the time of its release. It's a good length singleplayer campaign (albeit where you only play as one faction), plus skirmish and multiplayer. And it has generally higher production values than Dawn of War (which isn't intended as a slight on that game - I loved it).
Heart of the Swarm also justifies its cost, on the basis of everything I've seen so far. The technological platform is aging a bit now, though; if they want to put the third installment out at the same price point, then they probably need a much smaller release-gap to avoid justifiable rip-off allegations.
Monthly fees fund ongoing game development and server maintenance. For a matchmaking-only service like Starcraft 2, that's just not relevant. HotS should be able to meet its own costs on box-sales. Something like Mists of Pandaria can't.
For MMOs, the monthly fee is VASTLY preferable to the pay-to-win model.
A huge number of WoW players wish that Blizzard would split WoW into two games... PvE and PvP.
One of the biggest factors behind PvE players quitting the game is Blizzard's complete inability to stop tweaking and sometimes fundamentally redesigning classes. This is only very rarely driven by PvE or quality-of-game issues. More normally, it's because the changes were needed to correct a PvP imbalance. Having to relearn your class because some people you never talk to playing a version of the game you have no interest in have found an interesting way to exploit the game-rules is no fun. But it happens all the time.
There's a real tension in Blizzard between the people who know how to make a fun game and the people who spend years worrying about multiplayer balance. They both have a role, but they both need to be kept completely separate.
Certainly agreed on the original Crysis. I thought it was an absolutely awesome game for the most part, which suffered from having two particularly weak sections. First the "floaty" bit in the alien mothership, which would have been great as a quick diversion but ended up going on for far too long. And second the very final mission, on the aircraft carrier. Both, of course, were sections which discarded the game's usual open level design in favour of more traditional "corridor shooter" gameplay. Warhead was all the awesome stuff from the main game, minus the suck (though it was a bit short).
Crysis 2 wasn't great. I didn't absolutely hate it; I'd rank it above most of the other "Modern Warfare" style shooters out there by quite some way. But it certainly wasn't as groundbreaking as the original.
I beat Crysis 3 over the weekend and I think its quality as a game sits about half way between the first two. Aside from a few short sections, it's much less of a corridor shooter than Crysis 2; it's more a sequence of mid-sized areas strung together in sequence. Within those areas, you get a fair degree of freedom, with much less handholding than we had in Crysis 2. There's certainly much more of a stealth focus than in the last game.
In fact, most of the game's penultimate mission (there are 7 in total) is a single huge wide open outdoors area, with three "main" objectives that can be completed in any order you prefer (there's an obvious "first" one to go for, but it's much more finely balanced where you should go next) and a few optional side-missions to find. In other words, it's right out of the original Crysis. It takes maybe an hour to beat and is supremely good. The game then closes down again for its (fairly weak) final mission, but that penultimate mission gives a glimpse at what could have been.
The big problem with Crysis 3 is length. This is a short game. Probably no longer than Warhead, which was advertised and priced as an expansion. It's certainly quite a bit shorter than Crysis 2. It's really noticable that a huge proportion of the game's weapons only show up right near the end of the game, meaning that there's a lot of stuff in there that you barely get a chance to see. It reminds me of shooters from early in the current console generation, like the first Gears of War, where so much of the development time was going on the technology that there wasn't much resource left over to actually provide a decent length campaign. As the generation's gone on and the tech becomes much better known, games have gotten longer again, on average. If you take a slew of recent cross-platform releases; Resident Evil 6, Black Ops 2, Dead Space 3 - these are all significantly longer than other recent installments in their respective series.
It might be available on current generation console hardware, but the PC version of Crysis 3 makes me suspect that what we have here is the first true "next gen" game. These are the sort of visuals I'd be hoping to see from the PS4 and the 360's successor once people have learned the hardware a bit (shouldn't take long with the PS4 given the architecture, hopefully). And once again, the length of the campaign suffers as the focus goes on making the technological jump.
"Methinks they need something they probably haven't had in a long time--a conclave of their board and big-wigs to ask themselves some fundamental questions about what their mission is, how they are going to accomplish it, and how they're going to compete in the modern gaming market."
You're already at +5 insightful. If I could, I'd make it +6 on the basis of that line. The inability to ask that question is what's currently going wrong not just with Nintendo, but with a lot of Japanese developers (though Nintendo are probably the worst for it).
There just seems to be this incredible reverence when it comes to Japanese games development for the "grand old men" of the industry; Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata at Nintendo, but other companies have them too. These guys were absolutely fantastic at one point in their career, but the world has moved on since then and they've not moved with it.
We're a bit more brutal in the West. You're only ever as good as your last couple of games over here. Remember when John Romero was revered? Or Peter Molyneux? They both developed, or contributed to the development of, some of the best and most important titles in the history of computer and video gaming, yet they're both pretty much standing jokes these days because of the crap they went on to do later. Even where the fall from grace is less dramatic (read: entertaining to a certain kind of mind), it's no less real - David Braben spent a long time in the wilderness after Frontier: First Encounters (though there seems to be a bit of a rehabilitation going on at the moment with his new project).
In other cases, former titans of the industry just kind of slip from prominence. John Carmack has never been associated with a gaming disaster and has been one of the key driving forces behind the technological development of gaming, yet he's slipped away from the limelight and his influence in the industry is nothing like it was. Unlike the cases above, his retreat from the limelight has been dignified, but it's still been real.
It's going on at the moment. Under Randy Pitchford, Gearbox put out two of the best first person shooters of modern times in the Borderlands series - but can his reputation survive Aliens: Colonial Marines and the cross-industry mudslinging its aftermath is currently generating? I think it will be difficult.
And then there's the world of the uber-publishers grinding out their annualised franchises. Lots of people thought that the loss of key Infinity Ward personnel would put an end to the Call of Duty bandwaggon - but instead it just kept on rolling. It may not say particularly nice things about us, but in AAA Western games development, the commercial machine matters a lot more than the individuals now.
Meanwhile in Japan, a lot of the key industry positions are still filled by people whose last major achievement was in the 1990s. The last time Nintendo tried anything genuinely different with one of its franchises was Mario 64, in 1996. As others in this thread have noted, their software strategy is to pretend that every UI and online development since around 2000 just hasn't happened. The over-riding impression is that what goes into their games and their consoles is whatever least offends the sensibilities of a bunch of grumpy-old-men who still instinctively feel that they are the gaming industry and can still dictate consumer tastes in the way that they could when they were one of a tiny number of players in the market.
And oh boy are they still trying to control that market. Others have noted that they have a DRM policy that would make even Ubisoft blush. They're also the chief advocates of region locking and are the first people ever to mandate it on a handheld (a good reason to boycott the 3DS if ever there was one). They're also incredibly prescriptive about which games can come out in which territories, usually based on some really, really odd ideas about Western vs Japanese tastes (cf. the need for Operation Rainfall).
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it's still very much alive and out there. The parents PC contracts it regularly (my dad has appalling security and browsing habits). A friend of mine (who I generally regard as more IT literate than I am) just spent a weekend cleaning an infection of it off his (fully-updated, Macafee-profected) Windows machine.
And now for a gratuitous side-rant:
The source of my friend's infection was apparently a minor video-hosting site carrying game-walkthroughs. On balance, I believe him on this, because I'd had warnings from AVG about such sites myself in the past.
The trend over the last few years has been for game-walkthroughs to shift from text-format to long sequences of videos. Personally, I hate, loathe and despise this trend from a convenience point of view (try searching 30 videos for how to find that pesky item you're missing, compared to doing a quick search on a text file). But it's had some other unpleasant side effects.
See by default, these videos go on youtube. Thing is, however, game publishers sometimes object to complete video walkthroughs of their games being hosted there and do DMCA takedowns. So the videos then crop up on less notable video-hosting sites. Many of which appear to be malware infested hellholes.
So the moral of my (horribly off-topic) side rant: video walkthroughs suck. They're difficult to search, they're inevitably narrated by some idiot called "Tad" who feels the need to say how stoned he is roughly every 30 seconds and - they're turning into a really horrible malware vector.
You're right, of course.
But there's another, related lesson in all of this; one that's more for businesses than consumers. The irony is, it's not a new lesson; it's one that has been well known for decades (centuries?), but which seems to have been forgotten recently in a good chunk of the gaming industry.
That lesson is: "Your brands matter. Protect their value."
I'm sure that on one level, EA understands this. In fact, I suspect a few parts of the company (mainly those who handle its cash-cow sports titles, which remain well-received and commercially successful) understand it very well. It spends a fortune on advertising. It's known to throw its weight around when major releases get lackluster reviews. But at the same time, it has worked very hard in recent years to take some of the most potent brand names in gaming and drag them through the mud. And then set fire to them. And then take a dump on the remains.
A few examples: their acquisition of Bioware looked at the time like a bit of reputation control. Their name was in the crapper, so they tried to associate themselves with the halo surrounding one of the most highly regarded developers in the business. However, with Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, that brand very quickly ended up tarnished. Now, views will vary on EA's responsibility for that (personal view; extensive in the case of Dragon Age 2, but Mass Effect 3's failings felt mostly inflicted by people within Bioware). It wasn't just the disappointing games either; the day-1 DLC, starting from the original Dragon Age onwards (and I'd never accuse that game of being disappointing) did a lot to erode consumer good will and cement a reputation for nickel-and-diming customers who had purchased already expensive games. In fact, many of the post-launch DLC packs for EA/Bioware games have been good value, but the reputational damage is done by the day-1 stuff.
Or take Command & Conquer; one of the absolutely core franchises in the history of PC gaming. Actually, EA's history here is more complicated than it might appear. Westwood had itself done all it possibly could to tarnish this brand, with C&C2 and Red Alert 2, both of which felt years behind the curve at the point of release. EA's first move on acquiring the franchise was a bit odd and bewildering - sticking the name onto Generals - a title that clearly had little to do with Command & Conquer (which isn't to say that it was bad, just that it didn't look or feel like a C&C game). However, EA then seemed to buck its ideas up; C&C3 and Red Alert 3 were both, in their own ways, high quality titles and felt like a return to grace for the series. So what a pity that the usual EA self-destructive tendencies were allowed to take over; C&C4 was clearly rushed to release and was crippled by barely-functional always-online DRM. Since then, all we've seen has been some craptacular gestures towards the pay-to-win market.
And then there's SimCity. I won't dwell on this at length; the discussion is live across many, many gaming sites at the moment. But again, EA has taken a loved and respected franchise and smeared it in excrement. In fact, in this case, EA's reputation was already bad enough that I didn't make the mistake of buying this title.
The result of this? At one point, Bioware games - and games with the C&C or SimCity name on them - would have been guaranteed purchases for me (and, I suspect, for a lot of other people). As of now, though, I would sniff carefully around the reviews of a Bioware game, and wouldn't touch a C&C or a SimCity with a barge pole. The brand value has been substantially diminished or outright destroyed. There are other examples too; I loved the old (early 2000s) Medal of Honor games - but the first of EA's recent reboots was grim enough that I didn't touch its sequel and they've now canned the franchise again because a lot of other people clearly felt the same.
Funny thing is, EA aren't (quite) the worst in the industry at this. Dire though they are, I don't th
Perhaps one day we'll have Star Trek style holodecks. And that will be great. Until the point - roughly 10 minutes after the first trial - when people realise that if they're really bad at running around doing atheletic stuff in real life, they're also going to be really bad at it on a holodeck like that.
I think controllers which try to make games more immersive by having them mimic real life activities are (with a few exceptions I'll touch on later) missing the point.
That isn't to say that games shouldn't try to be immersive and that controllers don't have a role to play in immersion. However, given that in most games, the player is doing things he wouldn't be able to do in real life, simply trying to translate real-life controls into the game isn't going to work. In most genres, the best thing the controls can do is let the player forget that they are there at all. They need to be the most efficient means possible of translating the player's will into the behaviour of his on-screen avatar.
Every time a player dies (or otherwise fails, depending on genre) in game due to control issues, the immersion is broken. I can think of some really awful examples here, going back decades. Remember Ultima VIII, as it was at launch? Those jumps across the moving platforms, where a mis-step meant death? Remember how you could see precisely what you needed to do to get across, but how the atrocious point and click control inputs made each and every jump an exercise in trial, error and sheer luck? And remember how much it broke the immersion every time you failed - reminded you that you weren't the Avatar exploring a strange land, but a player wrestling with a cumbersome interface and control system? That one was bad enough that they eventually patched it (turning it from "atrocious" to "just about tolerable").
Or more recently, take the Super Mario Galaxy games. I enjoyed both of these immensely - until the point at which it became necessary to use the spin-jump to make certain jumps. See, "spin jump" was mapped to "waggle the Wii-mote". And "waggle" is not, on a Wii-mote, a precise input. There's actually a good bit of variation in just how much and how hard you need to waggle before the game will accept that, yes, you have waggled (and I can't believe I've just typed that sentence). So all of a sudden you have a precision platformer which is dependant upon a non-precision input. And even though it's only for one single input, each time you rack up an unnecessary death due to that input going wrong, the immersion is broken.
Or sometimes a game uses a "normal" input device, but because the game adapts itself to that device badly, it still ends up feeling broken. Resident Evil 6 is a case in point here. I've played this on the 360 and the PC and found the 360 version effectively unplayable, due to control issues. I don't normally object to playing shooters on a console controller (though I'd prefer mouse and keyboard), but the shooters in question need to make concessions to the fact that they're being played on a device less suited to precise aim. Actually, many console shooters these days do that well; snap-to aim, relatively generous hitboxes and slow-moving enemies may not always make for the most exciting game mechanics, but they do take a lot of the pain out of playing a shooter on a console controller. Resident Evil 6 makes no such concessions; in a game where only headshots do appreciable damage to enemies, aiming at these tiny, fast bobbing targets on a console controller is nigh impossible and the abiding impression I took away from my 360 version was that my in-game character actually had worse accuracy with a gun than I myself would in real life (which is saying something). After that, playing with mouse and keyboard on the PC was a complete revelation - while the game itself still has flaws, it was an order of magnitude better than the console version. By contrast, the recent Tomb Raider reboot makes such good concessions to aiming on a controller that I played it on PC using a 360 control
There's also the point that, in my opinion at least, IE has closed the gap with the other browsers quite a bit in recent years. I'd been using Firefox since 2004, but had grown increasingly irritated with a number of its quirks and foibles.
Got a new PC a couple of weeks ago and decided that was a good spur to check around and see how other browsers measured up. Having done so (and slightly through gritted teeth), I actually settled on IE.
Five years ago, somebody who was using IE was either ignorant or browsing from an office PC where they had no choice. I just don't think that's the case any more.
I wonder if the controller issue is driven by a desire for regional standardisation. There's a general consensus (wonder if it's actually true?) that Japanese gamers prefer a smaller controller and US gamers prefer a larger one (though obviously not one as large as the original Xbox controller). As a Japanese company, Sony will always be more exposed to feedback from its home market.
But yes, while I'm generally positive about the PS4 reveal, the controller does stand out as a bit of a sore-point.
I'd agree with you for the most part, but...
The 360 offering is substantially less attractive than it was two years ago. The new "third gen" dashboard UI is a big step back from the previous one. It's not just the sheer quantity of advertising, but also the irritation and number of navigations involved in trying to get to actual game content. Bizarrely, it's also a worse UI to navigate using Kinnect gesture/voice controls than the old "second gen" dashboard was.
The other issue, of course, is that while many frustrations remain around the PS3, Sony have raised their game in some respects. The PS Store is much better now than it used to be (admittedly that's a low bar) and PS Plus is actually a genuinely good service for people who don't have a massive amount to spend on games and don't care about always having the latest titles available, but just want a steady stream of games to play.
The controller issue, of course, is very real. The Sixaxis was awful and while the Dualshock 3 is better, it still has big drawbacks next to the 360 controller. It's too small for many people (including me), it offers poor grip and the shoulder buttons lack the precise analogue sensitivity of the 360 equivalent's.
And don't even get me started on mandatory game installs, patches and goddam firmware updates. At least Sony have realised that particular situation cannot continue on the PS4.
Your point is entirely valid, but I do hope they've been careful with the drafting of this one. They don't have the best record recently at avoiding unintended consequences.
Indeed.
I think the other point that dropped out of the discussion in this particular case (though plenty of people have brought it up elsewhere) is that people don't so much fear always-online requirements because they're worried their net connect might blip out (though that's a perfectly fair concern), but rather because they can see the thin end of the wedge approaching and recognise always-online as a direct underpinning for blocks on used games and rentals.
MS may be getting a lot of pressure from game developers to implement those blocks, but to do so would be absolutely suicidal given customers have a choice to jump to an unrestricted PS4 instead.
I'd have to disagree with you on the gap between console and top-tier PC visuals. Bioshock Infinite isn't as PC-optimised as some games out there, but I found the contrast between the PC version and the 360 version (which seems to be running on loop in my local game store) pretty huge. For something like Crysis 3, it's hard to believe that the PC version is even the same game (though it is an absolute system killer). In that case, I'd say the difference is not far off "Quake 2 software vs Quake 2 opengl".
"Gamers and developers aside" is an absolutely huge qualification. If you're leaving that aside, you may well be missing a big chunk of the reason for the decline in "home" PC sales.
Until somewhere around the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation, PC and console game development existed, for the most part, in separate worlds. Games which appeared in both worlds were the exception rather than the norm. But sometime in the middle of the last decade, rising development costs meant that cross-platform development increasingly became the norm.
Until that point, PC game system requirements had progressed on a kind of steady evolutionary curve; you really needed an upgrade every 2 years (maybe 3 at a pinch with some interim upgrades) or so just to be able to run the latest titles at all. Hell, you can more or less track the history of the PC update curve from looking at a few key titles; Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Wing Commander 3, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 (for example).
With PC game development linked at the hip to console game development, the hardware cycle doesn't work like that any more. The PS2/Xbox/Gamecube cycle wasn't too bad; it was a pretty short cycle and by the time PC development really started to get locked in with it, people were already talking about the successors.
But what we're in now is pretty much the longest console cycle we've seen (and it won't truly end until the PS3 launch at the end of this year - the Wii-U is definitely not next-gen in hardware terms). It's absolutely no coincidence that, until very recently, the iconic question about whether a PC will cut the mustard in gaming terms was "will it run Crysis". The original Crysis - a rare game not locked to the console cycle - was released in late 2007. Until very recently, it was still the most demanding PC game around, if you wanted to run it on max settings. A Crysis-capable PC in 2007 cost a lot of money; but by around 2009 or so, you could get the equivalent in the sub-$1000 range. With that PC, you could run pretty much anything released on max settings. System requirements did a small amount of very gradual upward drift, as developers learned the console hardware and were able to do slightly more ambitious things on it; but compared to the preceding decade, it was negligible.
This has started to change a bit recently; as we get into the very late stages of this console cycle, developers do start to push the PC versions of their games significantly beyond what the consoles can do - largely because they want the practice for next-gen development. I think I first noticed it with Bulletstorm - it wasn't huge on that, but it was clear that this was a game whose PC visuals were being optimised beyond what we'd become accustomed to. Battlefield 3 went quite a lot further (it is depressing that spunkgargleweewee tends to be the go-to genre for pushing system specs these days). More recently, the PC versions of Crysis 3 and (to a slightly lesser extent) Tomb Raider have felt like what we should expect to see from next-gen console games - and if you want to run them in max detail, then they do have much more demanding system requirements than what we've become accustomed to.
I'd expect to see PC sales (to home users) rise again over the next couple of years, as we get an upward lurch in system requirements to fit with next-gen console game development.
Christ almighty. You really are utterly fucking thick.
You must have missed the part where I said I lived in London and had a perfectly good net connection myself.
Judging by the stats you quote, I'm guessing you also missed the part where I said that I was primarily talking about parts of the world other than the US and Western Europe.
But don't let that get in the way of a good angry rant.
£60/month covers broadband, phone (including all calls except international) and TV package. Not cheap, not extortionate either. If you live in the right area, the UK's actually very good for broadband. The problem is that most of the country doesn't count as "the right area" yet.
Sorry, bad wording on my part. What I meant was "we aren't *even* a drop in the ocean".
I'm not in the US, so maybe I'm missing some context here, but...
How on earth are either of the links you've just posted examples of hate speech? The first is a line on the abortion debate that we've seen many times over the years. I'm not going to pick sides in that one; but if you approach the debate (as some people do) with the starting point that foes "life begins at conception" then abortion is infanticide. I think a lot of the lack of civility around that particular debate stems from the fact that neither side recognises just how high the stakes feel for the other side in it.
The second link is a fairly silly take on the gun control debate that somehow slides into an odd reductio ab absurdum take on the gay marriage debate. But again, incoherent though it is, is it really hate speech?
If somebody says "All members of (ethnic group x/social group y) are scum! Let's (kill them/throw them out of our country/deprive them of their property rights)" then that feels like hate speech. That's a hell of a long way from either of the examples you link to.
As a test, let's take an example from a left-wing perspective of somebody linking a (generally supported - the UK public consistently backs a tougher line on welfare in polls) Government policy to murder. In this case, it's the murder of the disabled rather than the infanticide, but I think that's still pretty emotive. So: from the UK's Guardian newspaper. Is that hate speech?
If you answer "yes", at least you're consistent. If your answer is no, then it looks more like you're just demonstrating totalitarian instincts to suppress speech that goes against your own values.
If you own MS shares and the launch a console with an "always on" requirement - SELL. Don't even wait for the end of the press conference.
It's not the reaction of the slashdot market you need to worry about. Will we cry foul over such a requirement? Yes. Will we be less likely to buy the console as a result? Yes. Are we a drop in the ocean? No.
Rather, it's the huge "hinterland" demographic, particularly outside the coastal US and Western Europe, that you should be concerned about. If you think that internet connections are as reliable and "always on" as the electricity supply in most of the world, then think again. Personally, I'm pretty lucky; I live in the suburbs of London and have a pretty meaty 120mbit downstream 12 mbit upstream connection with no monthly cap. But even here, reliability isn't perfect - in the 12 months since I moved into this place, I've had two serious broadband faults; that's actually better than the reliability of my old 6mbit downstream 0.5mbit upstream connection in my old place.
Get outside of the major cities and, even in the US and Western Europe, broadband connections become a lot patchier. Moreover, people who don't fall quite so far towards the nerdy end of the spectrum as I do are more likely to be on cheaper broadband packages with restrictive monthly caps; an always on device which is doing anything more than pinging status back and forward could be a major inconvenience for them.
Oh, and then you get some pretty developed parts of the world, particularly out around the Pacific Rim, where home broadband is still fairly limited (sometimes associated with ultra-high-density housing) and most net activity takes place in internet cafes.
If MS announces an always-on console, you can take that as a declaration that it's not interested in competing in those markets.
If the always-on connection is linked to restrictions on the use of used games, then you can take that as a declaration that it's not interested in competing in ANY markets.
There's a lot to dislike about Sony's record. Seriously - a lot (do I even need to say this on slashdot?). But thanks to unbelievable levels of stupidity from both MS and Nintendo, the PS4 is heading to win the next round of the console wars by default, simply by following a low-key, low-risk approach (PC-like architecture, no always-on, no used-games-restrictions, no expensive tablet controller pushing developers into territory they don't want to bother with).
Very sad news.
Iain Banks has written some really excellent stuff. I suspect that three of his works in particular will grow in stature and recognition over time; the Wasp Factory, Player of Games and Use of Weapons. The former is a fascinating (and seductively sympathetic) portrait of evil (or perhaps just insanity). The latter two are among the best examples of "intellectual" sci-fi. They use their sci-fi backdrops to tell stories which just wouldn't work in a more mundane setting, but touch on themes and ideas of much broader significance.
I suspect that in a couple of decades time, they'll be held on at least an equivalent level to that to which Frank Herbert's Dune is elevated today. It would be nice to think that they might go further and gain a reputation outside of the science fiction genre.
I'd agree with the comments here. To add a few things to it: the combat is marginally better than Bioshock 1 and 2. My biggest issue with those games was that the weapons lacked any sense of clout. You'd have an enemy charging you who was basically a psychotic human (no armour, no supernatural powers) and to take them down, you'd have to pump multiple clips of ammo into them. That just felt poor. Infinite has, so far (in normal difficulty) felt better in this regard. Not perfect, but better.
The two-weapon limitation is a step back for the series. Very, very few shooters are improved by two weapon limits. Makes sense for realism-heavy military shooters (Operation Flashpoint, ARMA etc), in anything else it just forces bad game design. "Oh look, there's a sniper rifle over there, the game is telling me I will need to snipe in the next sequence". By all means do what Borderlands and its sequel do and, for console control-convenience, have 4 hotswitch weapon slots manageable at any time by your (much larger) inventory. But absolute 2-weapon limits are the absolute worst trend in fps gaming over the last few years.
The story is good. I must say that, as with the original Bioshock, I suspect it's not quite as good as some of the reviews have made out. In particular, I don't think the political and moral dimensions are quite as sophisticated as they claim to be. It's all a bit... well... undergraduate. The first game was "Ayn Rand is bad!". This one is less sophisticated still "Racism is bad!". I actually thought the second game tried to be a little more sophisticated and grey-shaded, but that had the least rapturous reception of any installment in the series.
And on the technology front... I'm running on an i7-3820 (3.6ghz) and an Nvidia 680 in ultra detail. The graphics are very good - better than the console versions. However, they're not better than the console versions by the same margin as we've seen in Crysis 3 or (to a slightly lesser extent) Tomb Raider. With those games, it felt like the PC version had been developed to a level that was in-line with what we should expect from the PS4 and the 360-successor. The PC version here is more halfway-house-ish.
Slight digression on Crysis 3; I was discussing it with a colleague at work who does all of his gaming on the 360. He was really disappointed with the game, largely because of its campaign length. I came to it's defense "But look at the technology, this is next-gen stuff, so it's no surprise that other elements of the game got a bit squeezed, just as happened with the likes of the original Gears of War early in this cycle". His response "What technology? It looks just like Crysis 2."
A day or two later, I got to see the 360 version running on a demonstration machine in my local Game.
"Oh, so he wasn't even playing the same game as me."
The option of manual saves should be a mandatory certification requirement in shooters. There may be other genres where it doesn't fit, but for shooters it's an absolute no brainer.
My personal absolute least favorite trick ever is the one where you get to the end of a campaign mission in a shooter, watch a lengthy cutscene and then... it doesn't do a save until you've actually moved a way into the next mission. So if you survived the encounter at the end of the previous mission, sat watching your clock through a lengthy cutscene while thinking "I really need to go now" and then quit as soon as you get out of cutscene... you have to do that final encounter and cutscene all over again the next time you play. No idea whether Bioshock Infinite does this, but other titles, including some in the Gears of War and Resident Evil series certainly have.
I think the question "do video games contain good writing?" is probably not the right one to be asking. Or at least, not the relevant one for this discussion.
Of course there are games which contain good - even great - writing. Star Control 2, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate 2, Final Fantasies 6, 7 and 10, the entire Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series, most of the Mass Effect series - to list just a few.
However, the common factor surrounding these games is that they all fall into the category of what would be described (usually with a heavy smearing of condescension) as "genre" fiction in other media.
Does this matter? To most people, no. I'm perfectly happy to walk out of a bookstore with a sci-fi or fantasy novel, or to sit down and watch a Western on the TV. I don't think I'm alone (or even in a particular minority) in that. But there is a prominent cultural clique that is consistently unwilling to recognise "genre" fiction as inferior and not quite "art".
You can see it in the film world at the Oscars - sci-fi and fantasy find it very, very difficult to get a fair shot at the "big" awards. Occasionally something from the "genre" stable becomes big enough that it can't be ignored (Lord of the Rings), but by and large, the winners come from a very narrow pool. You can see every year that you get a group of films which are going Oscar-fishing. The trends have changed a bit over time (a few decades ago, you'd have needed to be a musical, but these days gloomy biopics are the way to go), but the existence of a fairly narrow category that is seen as intrinsically worthier has been consistent over time.
It's the same with the big mainstream literary awards - if anything, it's even harder for "genre" fiction to break through there (and a very, very small pool of authors tend to clean up year after year). A part of me thinks that the Hugo awards and the like should retaliate by having a "best mundane fiction" category, to recognise "the work which best overcomes its limitations of a serious lack of imagination to nevertheless be tolerably readable". I bet Martin Amis would be really proud of one of those.
I don't really see how video-games can break out of the genre box. It's a medium that's based around player-interaction, which is always going to push it towards a heavy focus on plot (generally one of the defining traits of much genre fiction). The question isn't whether video-games need to break out of that niche; it's whether we actually care if they do so.
I think people are overcomplicating this departure. I'd be surprised if it had the slightest thing to do with the latest upsets involving the company (SimCity and Real Racing 3). Rather, I think the share price decline - and hence the departure - is being driven by one very simple thing.
spunkgargleweewee
Forget all the "free to play" and "pay to win" crap. Investors know where the money in gaming is right now. It's in spunkgargleweewee. They look at Activision's profits from Call of Duty and think "I want a bit of that".
Until late last year, EA had a story to tell on this. The Medal of Honor reboot did ok. Not brilliantly, but ok. It got a foot in the door. Battlefield 3 did a bit more than that. It did quite well; it got a lot of the casual spunkgargleweewee drinker crowd playing because it tickled their tastebuds and it got a good degree of core-game interest because it was clear that the tech powering it was likely to be the starting point for the next console generation.
But then Medal of Honor: Warfighter happened. Crap marketing. Crap game. Profoundly negative appeal (for all sorts of cultural reasons) to the non-US market. Critical disaster. Commercial disaster.
Suddenly, EA no longer has a story to tell its investors on spunkgargleweewee. In this most important of markets, the graph no longer trends upwards.
That, more than anything else, will be what has driven this. Not proactive consumer boycotts. Not online protests. But the fact that their spunkgargleweewee ended up as a disappointment.
To expand a bit on this...
Wings of Liberty has a campaign that takes around 20 hours, plus a few "skirmish" modes and multiplayer.
Heart of the Swarm has a campaign that - going off early reports - is around the same length as WoL's. It is built on the same engine, so fewer development costs there. However, it has entirely new cinematics, voice work etc (a good chunk of the costs), new mission design and a radically designed multiplayer.
As a standalone, Wings of Liberty is roughly equivalent value to... say... the original Dawn of War, at the time of its release. It's a good length singleplayer campaign (albeit where you only play as one faction), plus skirmish and multiplayer. And it has generally higher production values than Dawn of War (which isn't intended as a slight on that game - I loved it).
Heart of the Swarm also justifies its cost, on the basis of everything I've seen so far. The technological platform is aging a bit now, though; if they want to put the third installment out at the same price point, then they probably need a much smaller release-gap to avoid justifiable rip-off allegations.
Monthly fees fund ongoing game development and server maintenance. For a matchmaking-only service like Starcraft 2, that's just not relevant. HotS should be able to meet its own costs on box-sales. Something like Mists of Pandaria can't.
For MMOs, the monthly fee is VASTLY preferable to the pay-to-win model.
Not *exactly* the same thing, but...
A huge number of WoW players wish that Blizzard would split WoW into two games... PvE and PvP.
One of the biggest factors behind PvE players quitting the game is Blizzard's complete inability to stop tweaking and sometimes fundamentally redesigning classes. This is only very rarely driven by PvE or quality-of-game issues. More normally, it's because the changes were needed to correct a PvP imbalance. Having to relearn your class because some people you never talk to playing a version of the game you have no interest in have found an interesting way to exploit the game-rules is no fun. But it happens all the time.
There's a real tension in Blizzard between the people who know how to make a fun game and the people who spend years worrying about multiplayer balance. They both have a role, but they both need to be kept completely separate.
Certainly agreed on the original Crysis. I thought it was an absolutely awesome game for the most part, which suffered from having two particularly weak sections. First the "floaty" bit in the alien mothership, which would have been great as a quick diversion but ended up going on for far too long. And second the very final mission, on the aircraft carrier. Both, of course, were sections which discarded the game's usual open level design in favour of more traditional "corridor shooter" gameplay. Warhead was all the awesome stuff from the main game, minus the suck (though it was a bit short).
Crysis 2 wasn't great. I didn't absolutely hate it; I'd rank it above most of the other "Modern Warfare" style shooters out there by quite some way. But it certainly wasn't as groundbreaking as the original.
I beat Crysis 3 over the weekend and I think its quality as a game sits about half way between the first two. Aside from a few short sections, it's much less of a corridor shooter than Crysis 2; it's more a sequence of mid-sized areas strung together in sequence. Within those areas, you get a fair degree of freedom, with much less handholding than we had in Crysis 2. There's certainly much more of a stealth focus than in the last game.
In fact, most of the game's penultimate mission (there are 7 in total) is a single huge wide open outdoors area, with three "main" objectives that can be completed in any order you prefer (there's an obvious "first" one to go for, but it's much more finely balanced where you should go next) and a few optional side-missions to find. In other words, it's right out of the original Crysis. It takes maybe an hour to beat and is supremely good. The game then closes down again for its (fairly weak) final mission, but that penultimate mission gives a glimpse at what could have been.
The big problem with Crysis 3 is length. This is a short game. Probably no longer than Warhead, which was advertised and priced as an expansion. It's certainly quite a bit shorter than Crysis 2. It's really noticable that a huge proportion of the game's weapons only show up right near the end of the game, meaning that there's a lot of stuff in there that you barely get a chance to see. It reminds me of shooters from early in the current console generation, like the first Gears of War, where so much of the development time was going on the technology that there wasn't much resource left over to actually provide a decent length campaign. As the generation's gone on and the tech becomes much better known, games have gotten longer again, on average. If you take a slew of recent cross-platform releases; Resident Evil 6, Black Ops 2, Dead Space 3 - these are all significantly longer than other recent installments in their respective series.
It might be available on current generation console hardware, but the PC version of Crysis 3 makes me suspect that what we have here is the first true "next gen" game. These are the sort of visuals I'd be hoping to see from the PS4 and the 360's successor once people have learned the hardware a bit (shouldn't take long with the PS4 given the architecture, hopefully). And once again, the length of the campaign suffers as the focus goes on making the technological jump.
"Methinks they need something they probably haven't had in a long time--a conclave of their board and big-wigs to ask themselves some fundamental questions about what their mission is, how they are going to accomplish it, and how they're going to compete in the modern gaming market."
You're already at +5 insightful. If I could, I'd make it +6 on the basis of that line. The inability to ask that question is what's currently going wrong not just with Nintendo, but with a lot of Japanese developers (though Nintendo are probably the worst for it).
There just seems to be this incredible reverence when it comes to Japanese games development for the "grand old men" of the industry; Shigeru Miyamoto and Satoru Iwata at Nintendo, but other companies have them too. These guys were absolutely fantastic at one point in their career, but the world has moved on since then and they've not moved with it.
We're a bit more brutal in the West. You're only ever as good as your last couple of games over here. Remember when John Romero was revered? Or Peter Molyneux? They both developed, or contributed to the development of, some of the best and most important titles in the history of computer and video gaming, yet they're both pretty much standing jokes these days because of the crap they went on to do later. Even where the fall from grace is less dramatic (read: entertaining to a certain kind of mind), it's no less real - David Braben spent a long time in the wilderness after Frontier: First Encounters (though there seems to be a bit of a rehabilitation going on at the moment with his new project).
In other cases, former titans of the industry just kind of slip from prominence. John Carmack has never been associated with a gaming disaster and has been one of the key driving forces behind the technological development of gaming, yet he's slipped away from the limelight and his influence in the industry is nothing like it was. Unlike the cases above, his retreat from the limelight has been dignified, but it's still been real.
It's going on at the moment. Under Randy Pitchford, Gearbox put out two of the best first person shooters of modern times in the Borderlands series - but can his reputation survive Aliens: Colonial Marines and the cross-industry mudslinging its aftermath is currently generating? I think it will be difficult.
And then there's the world of the uber-publishers grinding out their annualised franchises. Lots of people thought that the loss of key Infinity Ward personnel would put an end to the Call of Duty bandwaggon - but instead it just kept on rolling. It may not say particularly nice things about us, but in AAA Western games development, the commercial machine matters a lot more than the individuals now.
Meanwhile in Japan, a lot of the key industry positions are still filled by people whose last major achievement was in the 1990s. The last time Nintendo tried anything genuinely different with one of its franchises was Mario 64, in 1996. As others in this thread have noted, their software strategy is to pretend that every UI and online development since around 2000 just hasn't happened. The over-riding impression is that what goes into their games and their consoles is whatever least offends the sensibilities of a bunch of grumpy-old-men who still instinctively feel that they are the gaming industry and can still dictate consumer tastes in the way that they could when they were one of a tiny number of players in the market.
And oh boy are they still trying to control that market. Others have noted that they have a DRM policy that would make even Ubisoft blush. They're also the chief advocates of region locking and are the first people ever to mandate it on a handheld (a good reason to boycott the 3DS if ever there was one). They're also incredibly prescriptive about which games can come out in which territories, usually based on some really, really odd ideas about Western vs Japanese tastes (cf. the need for Operation Rainfall).
If Nintendo were an entrenched m