I was in attendance at the talk, and boy was it good. Jon Hopkins did a very good job above taking notes on both the demo and Will's slides and lecture.
OK, so here are some answers to some questions that have come up in the previous comments:
- Will didn't just talk about it, he gave a 45-minute in-game live demo of all aspects of the game, from bacteria to galactic god.
- Although I'm sure Will had practiced what he was going to demonstrate to us at the talk, there were times when things didn't go perfectly (example: he was trying to get ships from his town to attack a neighboring city's tanks, and they didn't attack and flew right by), and Will's an honest guy, so I'm pretty sure he really was playing it live and it they weren't playing any tricks on us like the HL2 E3 2003 demo.
- The game has a nice visual feel to it, but the graphics were about as revolutionary as the graphics in Sims 2 are. People aren't drooling over the graphics, but the gameplay. That's key.
- Will isn't introducing any revolutionary type of gameplay with Spore. Instead he's trying to take the best 10%-20% of exisiting genres/toys/games that he likes, including previous Maxis titles, and successfully combine them into one game. He said that it's a rule not to combine genres, and he wants to break that rule. I guess what's revolutionary is that it looks like he's going to make it work.
Wait till E3, where EA will finally let Will go more public with details. I'm sure that Spore will be winning a lot of "Best of Show" awards come May. Until then, trust us:)
RTFA. The quote was specifically was about Manhunt, and earlier in the article they praise GTA for its gameplay.
"Grand Theft Auto is the gaming equivalent of a crime movie; it's violent and explicit, but that violence exists in the context of genuinely good storytelling and gameplay. Manhunt, however, is more like a snuff movie."
That is true, demos do let a person try out a game before they buy it, but not enough companies offer them, or they offer them a while after the product has been out. If developers and publishers wanted to use free demos as a way to curb piracy, they need to be more proactive about making them.
Another problem with current demos is that often they show you one of the better parts of the game to get you to buy it, which customers could find misleading, sorta like buying a CD cause the single is good, but the rest of the CD is bad. A lot of the time, the demo level is a modified version of a level in a game, which is also misleading. And since the demo may take place in the middle of the game, it may also give away part of the plot which could be a spoiler.
I'm not saying demos are bad, but I think allowing a player to buy a game and return it after playing up to a certain amount has its advantages. Of course, this could lead to developers just making the first part of the game good and not focusing as much on the second half, but at least part of the game being fun would be better than none of the game being good...
The whole piracy issue is sort of a Catch 22: People say that they pirate games to try them out before they buy them as not to waste their money on a bad game/cd/movie that they can't return, and most stores won't let users return opened games/cds/movies because of piracy.
Somebody brought up a point that many movie theatres will offer refunds to people that walk out of a movie early because they don't like it. Of course, they won't refund you if you sit through the whole movie, I believe they only will refund if you walk out in the beginning. Perhaps a similar system could be set up for games?
Here's an example: When users install a game, they can register their copy of the game online. Up to a certain point in the game decided by the developer (whether the point be measured by how far they have progressed, or how much time they have spent playing, how many rounds they have played, etc), they will have an option to request a refund. If they chose this option, they could print out some sort of form that they can bring back to the store they bought it from and return it, and at the same time the software would be uninstalled from the machine. The store would honor the return, refund the customer his money, and mail back the game/form to the company and get their money back.
I know my example's not perfect, but it's an idea. There will still be people that will want to get the entire game for free without paying, but if you at least give customers the option to return games they don't like, then there will probably be a large amount of customers that will do that instead of illegally downloading the game to try it out.
Is it just me, or has anybody been noticing that everything's just been going bad for developers nowadays? I mean, it seems like every other day you go on Slashdot or Gamespot and there's an article about a development studio getting shutdown, or a publisher laying workers off, or a company's earnings report lower than last year, etc. People always talk about the video game being a growing industry, but all it seems to be is shrinking. This is very discouraging to somebody such as myself who is in the game development industry, because it feels like this industry is going to collapse any second.
Using your example about the RTS game, if it's a single-player game, then I agree that there's no harm in using automated tools, if that's your playing style. However, if you're playing in a multi-player environment against another person, I think it's unfair to use automated tools to increase your efficiency if the other player isn't.
I agree, it feels like the author of the rebuttal was just using the laws as an excuse to whine about problems in Massive games, rather than re-evaluate the laws themselves. He'll agree with a law, and then complain how the law isn't properly implemented in current Massive games. That has nothing to do with the laws themselves. Maybe his arguments would have been more appropriate if he had made his article about evaluating Massive games and seeing if they followed the laws.
The LotR games got mixed reviews, as some people just saw it as mindless arcade-style orc slashing, while others enjoying the arcade-style gameplay. As a result, the average review for Two Towers was ~80% and Return of the King was ~83%, which basically describes it as being good, although nothing amazing. Riddick has an average score of 90%, which is usually seen as a must-own title.
It feels like the author wasn't that impressed by Chronicles of Riddick, and tried to write a six page article about how this wasn't the first good movie-licensed game ever made. I'll agree with him, there have been other good movie-licensed games, but his examples are poor. Rather than point out the games that were actually good, he just barrages us with a million mediocre titles to which he says about all "It wasn't that bad."
I don't understand why the author chooses to defend mediocre titles, as that just tells developers that it's OK to release mediocre titles. Why settle for mediocre when you can have good titles?
And in response to those that wonder why the Riddick game is gaining so much praise for breaking the video game curse, here's why: First of all, it was released right before the release of the Riddick movie, so they were obviously trying to cash in on eachother, and most people were expecting a sub-par game as a result. It was a surprise that it turned out to be this good, as most good movie-licensed games come out much later after the release of the movie. Furthermore, there was very little hype for this game leading up to its release, as there was even less hype for the movie. Since most people weren't expecting much or didn't know anything at all about it, they were surprised by how good it was.
1% would actually be a really high response rate for spam, but even still, he probably did make a lot of money off of this. Also, if you note in the article, it said it was at least $100,000 as the lawyer said it was a six-figure number, so he could have paid close to a million as well. He probably has some money leftover, though.
I hardly consider a 90% to be bad. I generally consider 7/10's to be good games, 8/10's to be really good games, 9/10's to be great games, and 10/10's reserved for "this game goes beyond all perceptions that I thought a game was possible of." But most people will see a game got a 78% review and be like "This game must suck!"
You can't really call Advance Wars a strategy RPG because it's not an RPG. It's much more along the lines of a real-time strategy game like Warcraft, except it's turn-based. "TBS"?
No, it doesn't. The Phantasy Star series on Genesis was your standard RPG where "good guys stand here, bad guys stand here, fight!". A strategy RPG, or tactical RPG, is basically defined as an RPG where you and your opponents have the ability to move about the playing field in a turn-based fashion, and where your position can affect who and how effectively you can fight/cast spells/use items on.
Are they ads, or previews? I think everybody's used to seeing previews before movies, and often like watching them if they're for good movies. However, what most people don't like is having to sit through a Cellular One, Coca-Cola, Fanta, Old Navy, Movie Fone, Nintendo, and US Army ad before the previews even start.
I don't really see it going that way. EA Sports is the most powerful sports franchise in the gaming market, and there are a lot of loyal fans to the Madden series that would rather pay the $30 difference for the game that they're used to playing. There certainly will be some people that get NFL 2K5 instead of, or in addition to, Madden 2005, but I really doubt that it's going to be a significant amount to get EA worried. EA would only drop the price if they were losing a lot of sales to cheaper franchises. And if this plan doesn't work out as well as they hope, this could significantly hurt Sega, which could even possibly cause them to stop making sports games, and then EA would basically have zero competition.
I agree, reducing the price by 60% is definately a double-edged sword, and they certainly are risking that consumers will think that it's bargain-bin material. Consumers that aren't up to date with gaming news may see this on the shelf and say "Wow, this game's already been marked down to $20, it's that bad? Didn't it just come out? Maybe I should just pay the $50 for the EA title that I know will be of good quality and not run the risk."
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, but it actually may have been a safer move to sell it at $30 or $40, which is starting to become a trend for smaller games.
A group of grad students at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University did a somewhat similar project last semester called AugCog (Augmented Cognition). The main purpose was for military applications, as it was funded by DARPA, but they also did a bunch of mini-projects on the side that had Entertainment Applications. An interesting note about this project also is that the faculty advisor for this project was Jesse Schell, the new head of the International Game Developers Association.
What's the point of having the Simpsons as a cartoon, why not just use real humans? Because it's an artform, just like CG. studios make the concious choice to make the entire movie in CG, which gives them more freedoms and more restrictions at the same time.
Polar Express was animated in what I like to call "Kiddy CG", similar to the humans in Shrek. Rather than go for total realism like the Final Fantasy team tries to do, this approach purposely takes a step back to sorta make the characters a little bit cartoonish. What we end up with is creepy-looking characters who seem to move in a jerky fashion (just look at how the character in Shrek dance as an example). I'm not a fan of it.
An interesting idea in having the in-Matrix sequences be done in CG, except one major roadblock would be modelling the actors perfectly, which is very hard. Final Fantasy and Flight of Osiris had the advantage of using characters not based on a real person, so they didn't have to worry about matching it to a real-life counterpart. I found it interesting that the author of the article chose to use examples of graphics mimicking real-life people (Alias, James Bond) rather than imaginary people.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in attendance at the talk, and boy was it good. Jon Hopkins did a very good job above taking notes on both the demo and Will's slides and lecture. OK, so here are some answers to some questions that have come up in the previous comments:
:)
- Will didn't just talk about it, he gave a 45-minute in-game live demo of all aspects of the game, from bacteria to galactic god.
- Although I'm sure Will had practiced what he was going to demonstrate to us at the talk, there were times when things didn't go perfectly (example: he was trying to get ships from his town to attack a neighboring city's tanks, and they didn't attack and flew right by), and Will's an honest guy, so I'm pretty sure he really was playing it live and it they weren't playing any tricks on us like the HL2 E3 2003 demo.
- The game has a nice visual feel to it, but the graphics were about as revolutionary as the graphics in Sims 2 are. People aren't drooling over the graphics, but the gameplay. That's key.
- Will isn't introducing any revolutionary type of gameplay with Spore. Instead he's trying to take the best 10%-20% of exisiting genres/toys/games that he likes, including previous Maxis titles, and successfully combine them into one game. He said that it's a rule not to combine genres, and he wants to break that rule. I guess what's revolutionary is that it looks like he's going to make it work.
Wait till E3, where EA will finally let Will go more public with details. I'm sure that Spore will be winning a lot of "Best of Show" awards come May. Until then, trust us
"Grand Theft Auto is the gaming equivalent of a crime movie; it's violent and explicit, but that violence exists in the context of genuinely good storytelling and gameplay. Manhunt, however, is more like a snuff movie."
That is true, demos do let a person try out a game before they buy it, but not enough companies offer them, or they offer them a while after the product has been out. If developers and publishers wanted to use free demos as a way to curb piracy, they need to be more proactive about making them.
Another problem with current demos is that often they show you one of the better parts of the game to get you to buy it, which customers could find misleading, sorta like buying a CD cause the single is good, but the rest of the CD is bad. A lot of the time, the demo level is a modified version of a level in a game, which is also misleading. And since the demo may take place in the middle of the game, it may also give away part of the plot which could be a spoiler.
I'm not saying demos are bad, but I think allowing a player to buy a game and return it after playing up to a certain amount has its advantages. Of course, this could lead to developers just making the first part of the game good and not focusing as much on the second half, but at least part of the game being fun would be better than none of the game being good...
The whole piracy issue is sort of a Catch 22: People say that they pirate games to try them out before they buy them as not to waste their money on a bad game/cd/movie that they can't return, and most stores won't let users return opened games/cds/movies because of piracy.
Somebody brought up a point that many movie theatres will offer refunds to people that walk out of a movie early because they don't like it. Of course, they won't refund you if you sit through the whole movie, I believe they only will refund if you walk out in the beginning. Perhaps a similar system could be set up for games?
Here's an example: When users install a game, they can register their copy of the game online. Up to a certain point in the game decided by the developer (whether the point be measured by how far they have progressed, or how much time they have spent playing, how many rounds they have played, etc), they will have an option to request a refund. If they chose this option, they could print out some sort of form that they can bring back to the store they bought it from and return it, and at the same time the software would be uninstalled from the machine. The store would honor the return, refund the customer his money, and mail back the game/form to the company and get their money back.
I know my example's not perfect, but it's an idea. There will still be people that will want to get the entire game for free without paying, but if you at least give customers the option to return games they don't like, then there will probably be a large amount of customers that will do that instead of illegally downloading the game to try it out.
Is it just me, or has anybody been noticing that everything's just been going bad for developers nowadays? I mean, it seems like every other day you go on Slashdot or Gamespot and there's an article about a development studio getting shutdown, or a publisher laying workers off, or a company's earnings report lower than last year, etc. People always talk about the video game being a growing industry, but all it seems to be is shrinking. This is very discouraging to somebody such as myself who is in the game development industry, because it feels like this industry is going to collapse any second.
Using your example about the RTS game, if it's a single-player game, then I agree that there's no harm in using automated tools, if that's your playing style. However, if you're playing in a multi-player environment against another person, I think it's unfair to use automated tools to increase your efficiency if the other player isn't.
I agree, it feels like the author of the rebuttal was just using the laws as an excuse to whine about problems in Massive games, rather than re-evaluate the laws themselves. He'll agree with a law, and then complain how the law isn't properly implemented in current Massive games. That has nothing to do with the laws themselves. Maybe his arguments would have been more appropriate if he had made his article about evaluating Massive games and seeing if they followed the laws.
It will be elimated when the games are designed so that you're playing for the journey, not the destination, so to speak.
The LotR games got mixed reviews, as some people just saw it as mindless arcade-style orc slashing, while others enjoying the arcade-style gameplay. As a result, the average review for Two Towers was ~80% and Return of the King was ~83%, which basically describes it as being good, although nothing amazing. Riddick has an average score of 90%, which is usually seen as a must-own title.
I don't understand why the author chooses to defend mediocre titles, as that just tells developers that it's OK to release mediocre titles. Why settle for mediocre when you can have good titles?
And in response to those that wonder why the Riddick game is gaining so much praise for breaking the video game curse, here's why: First of all, it was released right before the release of the Riddick movie, so they were obviously trying to cash in on eachother, and most people were expecting a sub-par game as a result. It was a surprise that it turned out to be this good, as most good movie-licensed games come out much later after the release of the movie. Furthermore, there was very little hype for this game leading up to its release, as there was even less hype for the movie. Since most people weren't expecting much or didn't know anything at all about it, they were surprised by how good it was.
I heard a crazy rumor that Deus Ex: Invisible War was also a spinoff of Deus Ex. Lies, all lies.
1% would actually be a really high response rate for spam, but even still, he probably did make a lot of money off of this. Also, if you note in the article, it said it was at least $100,000 as the lawyer said it was a six-figure number, so he could have paid close to a million as well. He probably has some money leftover, though.
I hardly consider a 90% to be bad. I generally consider 7/10's to be good games, 8/10's to be really good games, 9/10's to be great games, and 10/10's reserved for "this game goes beyond all perceptions that I thought a game was possible of." But most people will see a game got a 78% review and be like "This game must suck!"
You can't really call Advance Wars a strategy RPG because it's not an RPG. It's much more along the lines of a real-time strategy game like Warcraft, except it's turn-based. "TBS"?
No, it doesn't. The Phantasy Star series on Genesis was your standard RPG where "good guys stand here, bad guys stand here, fight!". A strategy RPG, or tactical RPG, is basically defined as an RPG where you and your opponents have the ability to move about the playing field in a turn-based fashion, and where your position can affect who and how effectively you can fight/cast spells/use items on.
Are they ads, or previews? I think everybody's used to seeing previews before movies, and often like watching them if they're for good movies. However, what most people don't like is having to sit through a Cellular One, Coca-Cola, Fanta, Old Navy, Movie Fone, Nintendo, and US Army ad before the previews even start.
A artbook on the entire Final Fantasy series would be an excellent choice.
Yeah, effective advertising could get the word out that these games are good. I wouldn't be surprised to see excessive advertising on ESPN.
I don't really see it going that way. EA Sports is the most powerful sports franchise in the gaming market, and there are a lot of loyal fans to the Madden series that would rather pay the $30 difference for the game that they're used to playing. There certainly will be some people that get NFL 2K5 instead of, or in addition to, Madden 2005, but I really doubt that it's going to be a significant amount to get EA worried. EA would only drop the price if they were losing a lot of sales to cheaper franchises. And if this plan doesn't work out as well as they hope, this could significantly hurt Sega, which could even possibly cause them to stop making sports games, and then EA would basically have zero competition.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, but it actually may have been a safer move to sell it at $30 or $40, which is starting to become a trend for smaller games.
A group of grad students at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University did a somewhat similar project last semester called AugCog (Augmented Cognition). The main purpose was for military applications, as it was funded by DARPA, but they also did a bunch of mini-projects on the side that had Entertainment Applications. An interesting note about this project also is that the faculty advisor for this project was Jesse Schell, the new head of the International Game Developers Association.
Your girlfriend's parents' jaws aren't moving right? They should get that checked out!
What's the point of having the Simpsons as a cartoon, why not just use real humans? Because it's an artform, just like CG. studios make the concious choice to make the entire movie in CG, which gives them more freedoms and more restrictions at the same time.
Polar Express was animated in what I like to call "Kiddy CG", similar to the humans in Shrek. Rather than go for total realism like the Final Fantasy team tries to do, this approach purposely takes a step back to sorta make the characters a little bit cartoonish. What we end up with is creepy-looking characters who seem to move in a jerky fashion (just look at how the character in Shrek dance as an example). I'm not a fan of it.
An interesting idea in having the in-Matrix sequences be done in CG, except one major roadblock would be modelling the actors perfectly, which is very hard. Final Fantasy and Flight of Osiris had the advantage of using characters not based on a real person, so they didn't have to worry about matching it to a real-life counterpart. I found it interesting that the author of the article chose to use examples of graphics mimicking real-life people (Alias, James Bond) rather than imaginary people.