Meh, I don't see Halo health as that bad, most FPSes on the PC had a quicksave button and you were supposed to use it liberally, redoing fights if they left you with too little health. With Halo health surviving is enough and you don't have to worry about the next health refill. Since there's no quickload button either that's probably for the best as you don't get the option to redo a botched fight.
The problems with Far Cry 2 I heard about were more in the line of having an open world but doing it WRONG. Stuff like having to shoot guys from both sides even when working for one of them. Stuff like respawning enemies including refilling bases you cleaned out five minutes ago. The regenerating health was the least of its issues.
I also disagree on SupCom and CoH, SupCom was a terribly lame and uninteresting game that had insane hardware requirements (though FA supposedly rectified some of its shortcomings). CoH was a great game that had you do more than just stupidly pump out the rock to the enemy's scissors and then attack moving plus the ticket counter system meant that the game would end without one player having to crush the other's base which saved time and meant that for the last part of the game one player wasn't just playing with a half demolished base just waiting for the death blow. I dunno, maybe SupCom is amazing if you didn't already encounter all its interface innovations in Spring with lower hardware requirements and better game content...
The engine is not the game design or logic. The engine governs things like how resources are handled (bad engines can waste them). A really bad engine can hurt the game by affecting the game logic (e.g. collision problems, crashes) but that's probably not the level of bad he had in mind. A bad engine can just be freaking inefficient and a total nightmare to develop for while still permitting the target game design to function. It's like any backend, there's a whole load of badness it can have without the user noticing.
Having designers is one thing, having programmers listen to them is another. A common attitude for opensource software is "you can get the code, implement it yourself!". People implement their own ideas, not those of other people and most people suck at having good ideas.
Opensource game development requires a large number of people agreeing to make a specific game. Usually you will only get that much consent when the plan is "copy commercial game X and make it better". Hence most major opensource games are just plain old ripoffs of commercial titles.
Well, Agricola deals you a hand of 14 cards (7 from each of the two decks) and those can have a major influence on the game. However I've noticed that a player can pretty much ignore them and play more for traditional points and still win.
A recent thing? I recall RTSes starting out with similar sides and only with StarCraft did they really start making big distinctions between the sides where even basic mechanics could differ rather than just a few specialist units and maybe a stat change that doesn't really matter in the big RPS scheme. Nowadays RTSes get dinged for having too similar sides and the differences get more and more extreme (e.g. Universe At War had some very dissimilar sides AFAIK). What DOES happen is that every side has a certain set of units that has equivalents in the other factions but often implemented completely different.
I'll point at KP here because it's a fairly simple example: All three sides have a spam unit, a medium unit and a large unit. For the System that's a plain combat unit, a heavy artillery piece and an armored antiswarm unit, for the Hacker that's a slightly weaker combat unit with the ability to turn into a light artillery emplacement, the DoS longer ranged stunner unit that disables enemy units while it's beaming at them and the Worm which is comparable to a mobile and reusable landmine, one surprise strike at enemy forces, turning them into viruses and then hide and run. The Network's basic spam can be teleported by storing it in a buffer until it's needed, the medium unit is a flying gunship with explosive attacks that works best in swarms and is the only flying unit and the heavy unit is mostly a teleporter node for the spam with a decent anti-armor beam on the top. It's very different to encounter a Byte with its large, explosive shots than to fight a Connection that can bring the player's whole army to the fight in a few moments.
The problem is mostly that we need highly skilled labour and most of the worker pool is not qualified. You can't put a gardener or a plumber in charge of assembly line machinery in a factory and a barber won't be able to help you with IC design. Most of the low skill jobs can be done by machines but to design, operate and maintain those machines you need high skill workers. Just schooling people more won't necessarily help, many people simply aren't smart enough for the complex positions.
A man-sized armored target (there's a mention of sticking armor on it) is still very hard to kill, the usual anti-infantry weapons will be less effective (only the big ones will even hurt it) while the antitank weapons are designed for much larger targets. IEDs can damage anything but while they may be demoralizing and look bad in the news of the target's home country they are no serious way of stopping an army. Of course it's not going to bring losses to zero but it's going to make your dudes a whole lot harder to kill.
Did Linux dominate the market and then lose it while making announcements like "we've made our software deliberately hard to install so the lusers won't get it"?
What creates a big game library is not a powerful console or untapped potential, what creates a big game library is profitability for game developers and publishers. The PS1 and 2 kept running on during the following generation because they sold tons and a game for them could still make a lot of profit, the GC and XBox got dropped because they were way less popular and making games for them was not profitable enough, especially with new systems coming around as potential new profit sources. It's already becoming hard to profit on the PS3 and XBox 360 and their replacements aren't even announced yet.
It doesn't matter whether a system's graphical abilities are maxed out because graphical improvements don't matter anymore. That's why the Wii has 50% of the console market despite not only having the weakest hardware but also having a game library that's too lazy to even use the power that's there. It doesn't matter how much untapped potential the PS3 has for improving graphics, people stopped giving enough of a damn about that during the PS2 generation. Developers develop games to make money (that's why it's a job and not a hobby), not to trump each other on graphics.
My prediction is that both the 360 and the PS3 will be dropped like a rock when the next iteration rolls around and I also predict that both will be replaced* at roughly the same time. Replacement and longevity is not a company policy, it's a market effect. Even if Sony tries to go for a ten year cycle for the PS3 they'll have a hard time getting anything worthwile out of third party developers in the extended time and putting their own developers on it would mean not putting them to work on games for the PS4. Meanwhile the Wii might keep getting games after the end of its generation because it'll still have a gigantic install base by then.
Also untapped graphics potential cannot compete with a generational leap anyway, half a decade of technology improvements simply do more than just optimizing your code.
*=assuming the company doesn't withdraw from the videogame business
No, Nintendo just doesn't want an idiot who pulls publicity stunts instead of filing the required papers to get an SDK. Do you think the DMV would issue someone a driver's license when he doesn't take training and instead chains himself to the mayor's car?
Well, if you're looking for an FPS there's Onslaught on WiiWare, it's very good and a lot of fun but reviews seem to be intent on comparing it to Halo (which it isn't even trying to be, it's designed completely different). There's also a lot of B list (well, not really B but not GOTY caliber like the big 3/4, more like regular A list) games like Boom Blox, Wario Land, de Blob and Zack & Wiki.
The publisher for the US retail version did, neither the developer nor the EU publisher (who also financed the development to some degree) went chapter 11.
I found PyGame to be fairly easy to use. Yeah, it does require programming but you aren't going to get as much creativity into a system when you're restricted in what you can do (tweaking parameters only goes so far) and anything that's sufficiently versatile to do anything programming can is going to be just as complex. Any restricted system is going to involve hacks for true creativity and when you're going to pretty much hack your system apart you can just as well learn programming, it'll probably be faster anyway.
The current economic situation benefits developers who go for a lower budget since that way profit is easier to make. Indie games are low budget but many commercial games can have relatively small budgets too (Wii Fit anyone?). The current budgets needed to produce a so-called "AAA" title for the HD consoles has massively increased from the previous generation while revenue remained the same. The economic situation just accelerates what was inevitable: That these high cost epics fail to make enough money compared to their investment. I've read an analysis that this would happen and that was written before the crisis was even started.
The blame lies not with the economic situation, it lies with the companies themselves who throw gigantic amounts of cash at single games and then suffer when even one of them fails to live up to expectations. The economic situation is just a convenient excuse to make it look like this wasn't the fault of the people in charge.
I'm not sure it's really all that scary. The first time I encountered the claws was a bit of a shock but then again I played some IWBTG before then so that was really nothing (you haven't seen paranoia until you've played IWBTG). Oh and the final stages of Eversion are annoying as hell, especially the random everting where you simply had to pray that the ground under you wouldn't suddently turn into thin air (or even worse, into a pile of ground that breaks under you with no way to get out or even die, forcing you to restart the level). The autoscroller doesn't help either with the collision detection making it almost impossible to fit through one block gaps.
Oh and something I forgot to mention: That must apply to ACTUAL enemies, not scripted events or something. Only an actual enemy with dynamic behaviour is scary, a prescripted attack is pretty much an exercise in memorization and "foreboding" sounds in the distance aren't scary because you know they aren't associated with enemies, just part of the level script. Hearing something scream means the level designer told the level to scream, not that there's an enemy hiding nearby that just randomly decided to scream. The dead world is not scary (mostly because it doesn't behave erratrically and often doesn't even attack you), the living part is.
Don't call FPSes shoot'em ups, it's amazing how many people don't know what a shmup is these days. I've seen a thread about "best shmup" where half the responses were "Halo".
Low tolerance for failure (taking a lot of damage or even dying when messing up), uncertainity where enemies are (whether a facehugger jumping out of a corner or a ghost that can teleport around you) and generally a feeling of "ohshitohshitohshit" when an enemy engages you. FEAR wasn't scary, you've got a gun and you shoot people with it, neither was Doom 3 (though FEAR was more of a tactical shooter while Doom 3 was just "eat lead, motherfucker!"). The situation must be life or death, not life or slightly less life. You simply can't have a horror game when your main character is a supersoldier with bullettime, massive firepower and lots of health who murders an entire platoon before breakfast.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, I don't see Halo health as that bad, most FPSes on the PC had a quicksave button and you were supposed to use it liberally, redoing fights if they left you with too little health. With Halo health surviving is enough and you don't have to worry about the next health refill. Since there's no quickload button either that's probably for the best as you don't get the option to redo a botched fight.
The problems with Far Cry 2 I heard about were more in the line of having an open world but doing it WRONG. Stuff like having to shoot guys from both sides even when working for one of them. Stuff like respawning enemies including refilling bases you cleaned out five minutes ago. The regenerating health was the least of its issues.
I also disagree on SupCom and CoH, SupCom was a terribly lame and uninteresting game that had insane hardware requirements (though FA supposedly rectified some of its shortcomings). CoH was a great game that had you do more than just stupidly pump out the rock to the enemy's scissors and then attack moving plus the ticket counter system meant that the game would end without one player having to crush the other's base which saved time and meant that for the last part of the game one player wasn't just playing with a half demolished base just waiting for the death blow. I dunno, maybe SupCom is amazing if you didn't already encounter all its interface innovations in Spring with lower hardware requirements and better game content...
The engine is not the game design or logic. The engine governs things like how resources are handled (bad engines can waste them). A really bad engine can hurt the game by affecting the game logic (e.g. collision problems, crashes) but that's probably not the level of bad he had in mind. A bad engine can just be freaking inefficient and a total nightmare to develop for while still permitting the target game design to function. It's like any backend, there's a whole load of badness it can have without the user noticing.
I did a quick headcount and in the Spring lobby we have 9 Polish players, does that count?
Having designers is one thing, having programmers listen to them is another. A common attitude for opensource software is "you can get the code, implement it yourself!". People implement their own ideas, not those of other people and most people suck at having good ideas.
Opensource game development requires a large number of people agreeing to make a specific game. Usually you will only get that much consent when the plan is "copy commercial game X and make it better". Hence most major opensource games are just plain old ripoffs of commercial titles.
Well, Agricola deals you a hand of 14 cards (7 from each of the two decks) and those can have a major influence on the game. However I've noticed that a player can pretty much ignore them and play more for traditional points and still win.
A recent thing? I recall RTSes starting out with similar sides and only with StarCraft did they really start making big distinctions between the sides where even basic mechanics could differ rather than just a few specialist units and maybe a stat change that doesn't really matter in the big RPS scheme. Nowadays RTSes get dinged for having too similar sides and the differences get more and more extreme (e.g. Universe At War had some very dissimilar sides AFAIK). What DOES happen is that every side has a certain set of units that has equivalents in the other factions but often implemented completely different.
I'll point at KP here because it's a fairly simple example: All three sides have a spam unit, a medium unit and a large unit. For the System that's a plain combat unit, a heavy artillery piece and an armored antiswarm unit, for the Hacker that's a slightly weaker combat unit with the ability to turn into a light artillery emplacement, the DoS longer ranged stunner unit that disables enemy units while it's beaming at them and the Worm which is comparable to a mobile and reusable landmine, one surprise strike at enemy forces, turning them into viruses and then hide and run. The Network's basic spam can be teleported by storing it in a buffer until it's needed, the medium unit is a flying gunship with explosive attacks that works best in swarms and is the only flying unit and the heavy unit is mostly a teleporter node for the spam with a decent anti-armor beam on the top. It's very different to encounter a Byte with its large, explosive shots than to fight a Connection that can bring the player's whole army to the fight in a few moments.
The problem is mostly that we need highly skilled labour and most of the worker pool is not qualified. You can't put a gardener or a plumber in charge of assembly line machinery in a factory and a barber won't be able to help you with IC design. Most of the low skill jobs can be done by machines but to design, operate and maintain those machines you need high skill workers. Just schooling people more won't necessarily help, many people simply aren't smart enough for the complex positions.
A man-sized armored target (there's a mention of sticking armor on it) is still very hard to kill, the usual anti-infantry weapons will be less effective (only the big ones will even hurt it) while the antitank weapons are designed for much larger targets. IEDs can damage anything but while they may be demoralizing and look bad in the news of the target's home country they are no serious way of stopping an army. Of course it's not going to bring losses to zero but it's going to make your dudes a whole lot harder to kill.
That's why no power armor is complete without the prerequisite chainsaw sword.
I was thinking Warhammer 40k here but the Foundation is good too.
Did Linux dominate the market and then lose it while making announcements like "we've made our software deliberately hard to install so the lusers won't get it"?
Maybe that's where the old saying applies, "when all you have is a Cell processor every problem starts looking parallel"...
And?
What creates a big game library is not a powerful console or untapped potential, what creates a big game library is profitability for game developers and publishers. The PS1 and 2 kept running on during the following generation because they sold tons and a game for them could still make a lot of profit, the GC and XBox got dropped because they were way less popular and making games for them was not profitable enough, especially with new systems coming around as potential new profit sources. It's already becoming hard to profit on the PS3 and XBox 360 and their replacements aren't even announced yet.
It doesn't matter whether a system's graphical abilities are maxed out because graphical improvements don't matter anymore. That's why the Wii has 50% of the console market despite not only having the weakest hardware but also having a game library that's too lazy to even use the power that's there. It doesn't matter how much untapped potential the PS3 has for improving graphics, people stopped giving enough of a damn about that during the PS2 generation. Developers develop games to make money (that's why it's a job and not a hobby), not to trump each other on graphics.
My prediction is that both the 360 and the PS3 will be dropped like a rock when the next iteration rolls around and I also predict that both will be replaced* at roughly the same time. Replacement and longevity is not a company policy, it's a market effect. Even if Sony tries to go for a ten year cycle for the PS3 they'll have a hard time getting anything worthwile out of third party developers in the extended time and putting their own developers on it would mean not putting them to work on games for the PS4. Meanwhile the Wii might keep getting games after the end of its generation because it'll still have a gigantic install base by then.
Also untapped graphics potential cannot compete with a generational leap anyway, half a decade of technology improvements simply do more than just optimizing your code.
*=assuming the company doesn't withdraw from the videogame business
No, Nintendo just doesn't want an idiot who pulls publicity stunts instead of filing the required papers to get an SDK. Do you think the DMV would issue someone a driver's license when he doesn't take training and instead chains himself to the mayor's car?
Seems like a pyrrhic victory considering the Wii outsells the PS3 about 2:1...
That's only after the 360 got pricedrops.
Well, if you're looking for an FPS there's Onslaught on WiiWare, it's very good and a lot of fun but reviews seem to be intent on comparing it to Halo (which it isn't even trying to be, it's designed completely different). There's also a lot of B list (well, not really B but not GOTY caliber like the big 3/4, more like regular A list) games like Boom Blox, Wario Land, de Blob and Zack & Wiki.
The publisher for the US retail version did, neither the developer nor the EU publisher (who also financed the development to some degree) went chapter 11.
I found PyGame to be fairly easy to use. Yeah, it does require programming but you aren't going to get as much creativity into a system when you're restricted in what you can do (tweaking parameters only goes so far) and anything that's sufficiently versatile to do anything programming can is going to be just as complex. Any restricted system is going to involve hacks for true creativity and when you're going to pretty much hack your system apart you can just as well learn programming, it'll probably be faster anyway.
The current economic situation benefits developers who go for a lower budget since that way profit is easier to make. Indie games are low budget but many commercial games can have relatively small budgets too (Wii Fit anyone?). The current budgets needed to produce a so-called "AAA" title for the HD consoles has massively increased from the previous generation while revenue remained the same. The economic situation just accelerates what was inevitable: That these high cost epics fail to make enough money compared to their investment. I've read an analysis that this would happen and that was written before the crisis was even started.
The blame lies not with the economic situation, it lies with the companies themselves who throw gigantic amounts of cash at single games and then suffer when even one of them fails to live up to expectations. The economic situation is just a convenient excuse to make it look like this wasn't the fault of the people in charge.
I'm not sure it's really all that scary. The first time I encountered the claws was a bit of a shock but then again I played some IWBTG before then so that was really nothing (you haven't seen paranoia until you've played IWBTG). Oh and the final stages of Eversion are annoying as hell, especially the random everting where you simply had to pray that the ground under you wouldn't suddently turn into thin air (or even worse, into a pile of ground that breaks under you with no way to get out or even die, forcing you to restart the level). The autoscroller doesn't help either with the collision detection making it almost impossible to fit through one block gaps.
Oh and something I forgot to mention: That must apply to ACTUAL enemies, not scripted events or something. Only an actual enemy with dynamic behaviour is scary, a prescripted attack is pretty much an exercise in memorization and "foreboding" sounds in the distance aren't scary because you know they aren't associated with enemies, just part of the level script. Hearing something scream means the level designer told the level to scream, not that there's an enemy hiding nearby that just randomly decided to scream. The dead world is not scary (mostly because it doesn't behave erratrically and often doesn't even attack you), the living part is.
Don't call FPSes shoot'em ups, it's amazing how many people don't know what a shmup is these days. I've seen a thread about "best shmup" where half the responses were "Halo".
Low tolerance for failure (taking a lot of damage or even dying when messing up), uncertainity where enemies are (whether a facehugger jumping out of a corner or a ghost that can teleport around you) and generally a feeling of "ohshitohshitohshit" when an enemy engages you. FEAR wasn't scary, you've got a gun and you shoot people with it, neither was Doom 3 (though FEAR was more of a tactical shooter while Doom 3 was just "eat lead, motherfucker!"). The situation must be life or death, not life or slightly less life. You simply can't have a horror game when your main character is a supersoldier with bullettime, massive firepower and lots of health who murders an entire platoon before breakfast.