I'm sure some pundit on Fox will talk about how doing this just "tells people how to fix elections," like videogames teach to kill, the internet teaches how to make bombs, etc.
I disagree it won't be for "hardcore" gamers. I think it's just for smart gamers. I've played half a dozen games at the competitive level, played almost every MMOG in existence, and been playing most my life. I'm tired-as-hell of the arms race of graphics > gameplay getting all the press. I don't think it's actually made games worse, as there was never a time where the majority of games were worth buying, it's just shifted the attention.
I could care less about the PS3. They obviously don't understand gamers, nor respect them. There will be some good games, but I can get 10x as many good games on my DS and PC, and the Wii is the only console that really excites me (though since I'm joining BioWare, might have to get an Xbox and play Mass Effect...not like that's a bad thing).
PS3 isn't for the "true" or "hardcore" gamers, it's for the sucker gamers. A good Madden game or two, or the next Final Fantasy, isn't worth $700 when you can have just as much fun for a lot less money. The only people that NEED the PS3 are the ones that NEED to follow MTV-inspired franchises. Wannabe-gangsta teens are NOT the true "gaming crowd." They didn't start the gaming craze, and they're not the heart of it. They're just the deep pockets that Sony can manipulate with marketing.
But was this wiretap legal, or was it done with shadowy methods with no regard for proper process? If it's the former, then good for them. If the latter, only then do we need to re-think anything.
lol. I love how someone proclaims that "MMO gamers" want everything that the #1 MMO in the world fails to give. Thank goodness game development is left to the professionals and not the average board poster.
Half Life 2 is definitely "high brow." A look at the number of forum posters that don't "get it," even on this site, are proof.
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are also probably in that category. Spore will probably receive a great deal more critical praise than sales. It's rare, but they're out there.
"Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry..."...this probably means that we're about to hit a development wall. We know how good experts are at predicting these kinds of things.
Things were always better in the past. One things about the year that Godfather came out and suddenly all the movies that came out in '77 (or whatever year) were awesome.
Plus as we improve at filmmaking, the audience's standards increase. A lot more shit used to get past in..the past...without anyone noticing.
Everyone focuses on the "Big Brother" stuff like cameras in the TV, data mining, etc. That's not what Orwell was most scared of. What Orwell WAS most scared of is what's already been here for a very long time: the military industrial complex.
Ambiguous enemies that change allegiances, or sit on both sides, never-ending wars, patriotic diatribes with no real meaning other than to placate the masses and feed their bloodlust in order to continue the wars. That's the part of 1984 that was most telling. Yet Fox News would make one think that type of world is The American Way.
And how would an MMORPG go about making those classes fun? Do please remember that these classes have to all work in the same game. Entire games have been built around being a Merc, Thief, or whatever, and not ended-up being fun. And you expect an MMORPG developer to make the gameplay mechanics needed for a fun experience for 1/8th the player base? Realism is a factor you guys forget about. You think "make thieving, mercing, hacking fun" is an actual game design answer. That's just opening up a whole new area of production. Look at WoW. Yes the classes are different (especially Rogue), but they still work on the same principles. For Sci Fi you'd have to create a fun hacking game, a fun thieving game, etc.
And please don't start the "you can get close in real life" argument, to the people below this post. That's absolutely, positively, stupid. My T'ai Chi master back in Beijing, who has over 1,000 students, taught Jet Li, and has people fly-in from around the world to study with him, has even said fighting with anything other than a gun is stupid. Hits farther, hits harder. The "you can get close if you're smart/quick" argument a stupid UFC fanboy argument that, if it actually had to be proven, would get a WHOLE lot of idiots killed.
Fantasy has several established archetypes so there's enough variety in character choice. Warrior, Rogue, Ranger, Mage, Healer, and some variation in between. Sci-fi's got guns. That's it. If you're Star Wars you've got guns and lightsabers, but Jedi are supposed to be rare.
Balancing melee weapons with guns (a la SWG) is pretty much impossible because it breaks the laws of physics and along with the basics of latency, ruins the fun for either the melee classes because they can't get close enough (realistic) or the ranged classes are so gimped that the melee can trash them against all logic and reason.
Trying to create enough classes with guns just needlessly restricts the player. Why shouldn't a guy that's an expert with a rifle be able to shoot a carbine? That makes no sense.
At least that's the answer I can take from SWG. Star Wars really isn't a good universe for an MMORPG. An MMOFPS, though, now that would be a different story. Anarchy Online, I think, just wasn't all that attractive of a universe. Very odd. And had a very rough start. If there was a Sci Fi game with the polish and pazazz of WoW, I'm sure it'd do just fine, if they could solve the class problem.
Innovative AND fun is what the fanboys want. Look at the stuff that's happening on DS and will happen on the Wii for examples. Or the trailer for Portal.
The order of preferences goes as such Fun AND Innovative > just Fun > just Innovative.
Who plays Sims, though, mostly? Young girls. Sim City was interesting to non-gamers because they got to play god with a situation familiar to them: human cities. Spore will neither attract young girls nor attract anywhere near the number of non-gamers Sim City did.
Basically Will's come full circle back around to Populous. And hardly anyone played Populous.
This enormous effect that Wright games are going to have on the industry never surface. Yes a bunch of games tried to clone The Sim's success. None of them have succeeded. The Tycoon games took Sim City's basis and took off, but only in the tiny, non-gamer, $9.99 niche.
Wright's games exist in their own little world because while they're respected and appreciated by all the industry, they catch the imaginations of only very limited audiences. It just so happens that with The Sims he hit the ultimate niche audience, teenage girls. No one's going to revolutionize gaming by capturing their time, though, just as Britney Spears and N'Sync won't revolutionize music.
Because like all Will Wright games, people will try it and admire it for its creativity and inventiveness, and then go play something else that's a good deal more fun.
That's actually true of commercial pop music artists, too. Look at the songs put out at the end of the New Kids, N'Sync, and Britney Spears' careers. Always something about how tough they are and how they'll be around for a long time....meaning one more week.
Do you think it's at all possible the standing had anything to do with the disc, though? I don't know anything about such maladies, so just wanted to ask.
Anyone that questions Wii's potential graphically doesn't know anything about graphics beyond the buzzwords Sony and M$ shove down their throats. Don't listen to them. There's some very simple and telling facts about the Wii:
- 2-2.5x the power of Gamecube is a CONSERVATIVE estimate.
- The graphics in Resident Evil 4 were considered better on Gamecube than on any other platform. The graphics rivaled even the best of PC games like HL2 and Doom 3. The Gamecube was NOT a weak system, it's potential was just rarely reached.
- The Wii architecture is near identical to Gamecube, just multiplied in horsepower a few times. This means anyone that worked on Gamecube doesn't have to learn a new platform. This is unique to the Wii among consoles.
- Some very big names like BioWare and Capcom are onboard for the Wii, and their developers are excited as hell. You can pretty much count on these companies to squeeze everything they can out of the hardware and blow everyone away. Can you imagine a Resident Evil game with 3x the graphics of the 4th one, AND with new gameplay enabled by the Wiimote?
It's telling of Wii's upside just how desperate and weak the trolls' description of the downside sounds. There's never a guarantee and it will all come down to the games, but the naysayers really don't have anywhere to stand this time. If the Wii fails it will be against ALL rational expectations. But if you wanna hedge your bets and troll it, oh well, your loss when it's a success. I know how hard it is to say anything positive on the internets. Can't risk the e-peen.
Hey if you have more fun with sanctimonious flaming of a company trying to break publishers' stranglehold on gaming than you do the Citizen Kane of gaming, your loss, and Valve really won't miss you.
Actually no, the event is not a roast. Yes there's usually a handful of jokes at the government's expense, but no more than any other awards show. The only difference is that the President and heads of state attend this one. Check out the DVD they're releasing of Clinton's performance at one of these things. He really needs to do a SNL gig.
No one has EVER stuck it to the President and the rest of the government this seriously at this event. EVER. Not even close. Not to say no one would, but has a comedian ever had THIS much material? And considering how aggressive the material was, I doubt many would have the guts.
Cheers to Stephen Colbert for not pulling any punches, which no one has ever done at this event.
signed - mindless sycophant that actually has some perspective on the event.
Ebert is the only critic that I even read. I often disagree, but he's the most educated critic out there, AND he can let himself enjoy movies as they're meant to be enjoyed. He gave Mortal Kombat a well-deserved thumbs up, for instance. It was just a kung fu, game-based movie, but for a kung fu, game-based movie it was quite good. Good fight choreography, an interesting spin on the Bloodsport genre, and it didn't try to be anything it wasn't. Eberts the only critic that always recognizes what the movie is trying to be, rather than what he thinks it should have been.
"Lack of characterization"? Then he says he likes HL1 for being a "blank slate" for modders to work with, and HL2 has a too well-defined story? How in the hell does that make any sense?
Personally I think HL2 was too far ahead of its time for a good chunk of gamers to get it. Or that it's a genre all its own that players don't yet know how to enjoy. The ass-backwards criticisms are a testament to that. The PC gaming community has become so obsessed with mod-ability (which HL2 actually is first-class in, only beaten by Unreal) that many can't enjoy a linear, non-sandbox masterpiece of a game because you're not allowed to go off in any direction and do whatever you want, GTA-style. Games don't HAVE to be open-ended.
Have you actually SEEN Second Life? It's ugly to the point of giving eye cancer. Perfect example of the "hey wouldn't it be cool if...." mentality falling flat on its face.
People have been pushing the "design your own content" angle for a decade at least, and it has yet to come to fruition because it's a bad idea spawned by ignorant k00l dewds that think they can design better games than the professionals despite the lack of any training or skill.
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Wow. This post and the replies to it have to be some of the most sanctimonially ignorant game critiques I've ever seen. And that's saying something.
I'm sure some pundit on Fox will talk about how doing this just "tells people how to fix elections," like videogames teach to kill, the internet teaches how to make bombs, etc.
I disagree it won't be for "hardcore" gamers. I think it's just for smart gamers. I've played half a dozen games at the competitive level, played almost every MMOG in existence, and been playing most my life. I'm tired-as-hell of the arms race of graphics > gameplay getting all the press. I don't think it's actually made games worse, as there was never a time where the majority of games were worth buying, it's just shifted the attention.
I could care less about the PS3. They obviously don't understand gamers, nor respect them. There will be some good games, but I can get 10x as many good games on my DS and PC, and the Wii is the only console that really excites me (though since I'm joining BioWare, might have to get an Xbox and play Mass Effect...not like that's a bad thing).
PS3 isn't for the "true" or "hardcore" gamers, it's for the sucker gamers. A good Madden game or two, or the next Final Fantasy, isn't worth $700 when you can have just as much fun for a lot less money. The only people that NEED the PS3 are the ones that NEED to follow MTV-inspired franchises. Wannabe-gangsta teens are NOT the true "gaming crowd." They didn't start the gaming craze, and they're not the heart of it. They're just the deep pockets that Sony can manipulate with marketing.
But was this wiretap legal, or was it done with shadowy methods with no regard for proper process? If it's the former, then good for them. If the latter, only then do we need to re-think anything.
lol. I love how someone proclaims that "MMO gamers" want everything that the #1 MMO in the world fails to give. Thank goodness game development is left to the professionals and not the average board poster.
Half Life 2 is definitely "high brow." A look at the number of forum posters that don't "get it," even on this site, are proof. Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are also probably in that category. Spore will probably receive a great deal more critical praise than sales. It's rare, but they're out there.
"Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry..." ...this probably means that we're about to hit a development wall. We know how good experts are at predicting these kinds of things.
Things were always better in the past. One things about the year that Godfather came out and suddenly all the movies that came out in '77 (or whatever year) were awesome. Plus as we improve at filmmaking, the audience's standards increase. A lot more shit used to get past in..the past...without anyone noticing.
Everyone focuses on the "Big Brother" stuff like cameras in the TV, data mining, etc. That's not what Orwell was most scared of. What Orwell WAS most scared of is what's already been here for a very long time: the military industrial complex.
Ambiguous enemies that change allegiances, or sit on both sides, never-ending wars, patriotic diatribes with no real meaning other than to placate the masses and feed their bloodlust in order to continue the wars. That's the part of 1984 that was most telling. Yet Fox News would make one think that type of world is The American Way.
And how would an MMORPG go about making those classes fun? Do please remember that these classes have to all work in the same game. Entire games have been built around being a Merc, Thief, or whatever, and not ended-up being fun. And you expect an MMORPG developer to make the gameplay mechanics needed for a fun experience for 1/8th the player base? Realism is a factor you guys forget about. You think "make thieving, mercing, hacking fun" is an actual game design answer. That's just opening up a whole new area of production. Look at WoW. Yes the classes are different (especially Rogue), but they still work on the same principles. For Sci Fi you'd have to create a fun hacking game, a fun thieving game, etc.
And please don't start the "you can get close in real life" argument, to the people below this post. That's absolutely, positively, stupid. My T'ai Chi master back in Beijing, who has over 1,000 students, taught Jet Li, and has people fly-in from around the world to study with him, has even said fighting with anything other than a gun is stupid. Hits farther, hits harder. The "you can get close if you're smart/quick" argument a stupid UFC fanboy argument that, if it actually had to be proven, would get a WHOLE lot of idiots killed.
Fantasy has several established archetypes so there's enough variety in character choice. Warrior, Rogue, Ranger, Mage, Healer, and some variation in between. Sci-fi's got guns. That's it. If you're Star Wars you've got guns and lightsabers, but Jedi are supposed to be rare.
Balancing melee weapons with guns (a la SWG) is pretty much impossible because it breaks the laws of physics and along with the basics of latency, ruins the fun for either the melee classes because they can't get close enough (realistic) or the ranged classes are so gimped that the melee can trash them against all logic and reason.
Trying to create enough classes with guns just needlessly restricts the player. Why shouldn't a guy that's an expert with a rifle be able to shoot a carbine? That makes no sense.
At least that's the answer I can take from SWG. Star Wars really isn't a good universe for an MMORPG. An MMOFPS, though, now that would be a different story. Anarchy Online, I think, just wasn't all that attractive of a universe. Very odd. And had a very rough start. If there was a Sci Fi game with the polish and pazazz of WoW, I'm sure it'd do just fine, if they could solve the class problem.
Supposedly there's a pretty sad moment in Shadow of the Colossus with the horse.
And the trailer hints to some loss in HL2: Ep. 2 that could be pretty sad.
Innovative AND fun is what the fanboys want. Look at the stuff that's happening on DS and will happen on the Wii for examples. Or the trailer for Portal. The order of preferences goes as such Fun AND Innovative > just Fun > just Innovative.
Black & White was Peter Molyneux, not Wright.
Wii will rock you!
Who plays Sims, though, mostly? Young girls. Sim City was interesting to non-gamers because they got to play god with a situation familiar to them: human cities. Spore will neither attract young girls nor attract anywhere near the number of non-gamers Sim City did. Basically Will's come full circle back around to Populous. And hardly anyone played Populous. This enormous effect that Wright games are going to have on the industry never surface. Yes a bunch of games tried to clone The Sim's success. None of them have succeeded. The Tycoon games took Sim City's basis and took off, but only in the tiny, non-gamer, $9.99 niche. Wright's games exist in their own little world because while they're respected and appreciated by all the industry, they catch the imaginations of only very limited audiences. It just so happens that with The Sims he hit the ultimate niche audience, teenage girls. No one's going to revolutionize gaming by capturing their time, though, just as Britney Spears and N'Sync won't revolutionize music.
Because like all Will Wright games, people will try it and admire it for its creativity and inventiveness, and then go play something else that's a good deal more fun.
That's actually true of commercial pop music artists, too. Look at the songs put out at the end of the New Kids, N'Sync, and Britney Spears' careers. Always something about how tough they are and how they'll be around for a long time....meaning one more week.
Sorry to hear about the disc.
Do you think it's at all possible the standing had anything to do with the disc, though? I don't know anything about such maladies, so just wanted to ask.
Anyone that questions Wii's potential graphically doesn't know anything about graphics beyond the buzzwords Sony and M$ shove down their throats. Don't listen to them. There's some very simple and telling facts about the Wii:
- 2-2.5x the power of Gamecube is a CONSERVATIVE estimate.
- The graphics in Resident Evil 4 were considered better on Gamecube than on any other platform. The graphics rivaled even the best of PC games like HL2 and Doom 3. The Gamecube was NOT a weak system, it's potential was just rarely reached.
- The Wii architecture is near identical to Gamecube, just multiplied in horsepower a few times. This means anyone that worked on Gamecube doesn't have to learn a new platform. This is unique to the Wii among consoles.
- Some very big names like BioWare and Capcom are onboard for the Wii, and their developers are excited as hell. You can pretty much count on these companies to squeeze everything they can out of the hardware and blow everyone away. Can you imagine a Resident Evil game with 3x the graphics of the 4th one, AND with new gameplay enabled by the Wiimote?
It's telling of Wii's upside just how desperate and weak the trolls' description of the downside sounds. There's never a guarantee and it will all come down to the games, but the naysayers really don't have anywhere to stand this time. If the Wii fails it will be against ALL rational expectations. But if you wanna hedge your bets and troll it, oh well, your loss when it's a success. I know how hard it is to say anything positive on the internets. Can't risk the e-peen.
Hey if you have more fun with sanctimonious flaming of a company trying to break publishers' stranglehold on gaming than you do the Citizen Kane of gaming, your loss, and Valve really won't miss you.
Actually no, the event is not a roast. Yes there's usually a handful of jokes at the government's expense, but no more than any other awards show. The only difference is that the President and heads of state attend this one. Check out the DVD they're releasing of Clinton's performance at one of these things. He really needs to do a SNL gig.
No one has EVER stuck it to the President and the rest of the government this seriously at this event. EVER. Not even close. Not to say no one would, but has a comedian ever had THIS much material? And considering how aggressive the material was, I doubt many would have the guts.
Cheers to Stephen Colbert for not pulling any punches, which no one has ever done at this event.
signed - mindless sycophant that actually has some perspective on the event.
Ebert is the only critic that I even read. I often disagree, but he's the most educated critic out there, AND he can let himself enjoy movies as they're meant to be enjoyed. He gave Mortal Kombat a well-deserved thumbs up, for instance. It was just a kung fu, game-based movie, but for a kung fu, game-based movie it was quite good. Good fight choreography, an interesting spin on the Bloodsport genre, and it didn't try to be anything it wasn't. Eberts the only critic that always recognizes what the movie is trying to be, rather than what he thinks it should have been.
"Lack of characterization"? Then he says he likes HL1 for being a "blank slate" for modders to work with, and HL2 has a too well-defined story? How in the hell does that make any sense?
Personally I think HL2 was too far ahead of its time for a good chunk of gamers to get it. Or that it's a genre all its own that players don't yet know how to enjoy. The ass-backwards criticisms are a testament to that. The PC gaming community has become so obsessed with mod-ability (which HL2 actually is first-class in, only beaten by Unreal) that many can't enjoy a linear, non-sandbox masterpiece of a game because you're not allowed to go off in any direction and do whatever you want, GTA-style. Games don't HAVE to be open-ended.
Have you actually SEEN Second Life? It's ugly to the point of giving eye cancer. Perfect example of the "hey wouldn't it be cool if...." mentality falling flat on its face.
People have been pushing the "design your own content" angle for a decade at least, and it has yet to come to fruition because it's a bad idea spawned by ignorant k00l dewds that think they can design better games than the professionals despite the lack of any training or skill.