I don't recall ever blocking an attack, to be honest, or any mechanism to do so. It's been a while since I played it, though. I'll probably pick it up and try again at some point.
Regardless, one could look at this in two ways: We're both talking about how "I did something wrong", but I apparently missed a crucial element of gameplay. One could also look at it as the game failing to introduce those concepts forcefully enough for thick-headed individuals like myself... although I seem to have no problem playing Disgaea 3.
Also, the way the game dealt with player deaths just seemed rather... bad. You just lost a fight, and you no longer have any of the items you used during that fight, but you apparently gained nothing (except knowledge, I guess). In fact - I believe you lost an achievement - if playing on Xbox Arcade version - if you die at all. I got into a cycle where I lost a few times in succession, and had no items to use then (which I used liberally to try to win said fight earlier). At that point, I was at a fairly severe disadvantage, and so put the game down and played something else.
We'll see how the second play attempt goes, I suppose, before I decide whether to buy another episode. I really did want to like this game.
Did I do something wrong, then? I was finding it fairly easy at first too. I played the game until I hit the urban "slum" area, and the first enemy I ran into killed me off with two hits. The hell? It's not exactly as though I can go anyplace else, or go back and grind up in levels... Best of all, when you die and respawn, (if I'm remembering correctly) you're missing all the items you burned through during the first battle. Makes for a nice downwards spiral.
I obviously missed something, but when a game smacks you in the face like that, I tend to shut it off and play something else. I have a lot less patience with this sort of thing than I did when I was 13, I guess. It's a shame, because I was really enjoying the game up to that point.
Or, we could just refuse to support DRM in *any* way, and watch it die a lingering, painful death.
Your suggestion is perfectly reasonably from a technical standpoint, but it grants DRM legitimacy in the consumer mind. I don't mean to be insensitive to individual's plights, but... painful lessons tend to be the best-learned lessons. If people realize that DRM'ed music is essentially held hostage by the sellers, and is therefore riskier to buy, than ultimately that's a good thing for moving things in a better direction - that is, sales of DRM-free digital products.
If you want real freedom, try chess or one of the games where the game play is not hard-coded in.
Huh? I'm pretty sure chess has a very finite set of rules. The gameplay is certainly "hard-coded" in. No mistake, I'm a big fan of chess, but I think perhaps you'd do better with a example such as "playing in a sandbox" - which, not coincidentally, is the typical analogy used for very open-ended games.
You're correct in principle, though. We're a long ways from achieving true freedom in games. Very little happens through truly emergent systems in games. Games such as GTA4, which give the player a vast amount of freedom, are created largely through brute force and scripted systems. Beyond the difficulty of even programming such a system, one big problem with truly emergent gameplay is testing coverage. If you have infinite possibilities, the possibility of a game-breaking combination becomes greater as well. This is why most games (both computer and other) traditionally attempt to simplify mechanics into a few easily understandable rules that simulate a system of greater complexity.
The WMA DRM protection system can explicitly allow or disallow users to burn CD audio from the encrypted files. It's not necessarily using the analog output, which would obviously have to be redigitized, resulting in further quality loss.
Also, they can't really stop the "analog hole" until they implant DRM-laden microchips in our ears, and forcibly encode all the world's audio sources. Or ban all consumer microphones and recording devices.
This would work, but I think that physics might have something to say about the potential return of energy that this device produced vs the amount of energy it consumes.
Remember that with carbon-based fuels, you're talking about releasing a large potential of energy already stored in the fuel itself. Any sort of energy expended to increase the efficiency of extraction can likely be powered by the fuel's untapped energy potential. It's really no different than how the burning of the fuel itself currently powers all fuel processing components require to feed the engine, such as pumps, fuel injectors, the ignition spark, etc. For example, adding a fuel injector, despite requiring additional power to pressurize the fuel (versus a carburetors), ends up releasing more net energy from the fuel.
You should have seen the original incarnation of portal created by a bunch of european college students. they had no idea of the power of their concept. Their execution was decent for college students, but their game was just not the same experience as portal. Valve came along and recognized the power of that concept and put great designers on that project.
Just so you know... the precursor to Portal - Narbacular Drop - was developed by Digipen students (some of my co-workers were classmates of theirs actually). Valve then *hired those students*, who went on to create Portal.
I devised a concept a decade ago about a game based on escape and evade. The focus wasn't on combat, but being clever, skilled, and athletic.
About a million other gamers have also devised awesome game concepts. From someone in the game industry, let me offer a piece of unsolicited advice: Awesome game concepts are a dime a dozen. Solid execution of a concept is worth its weight in platinum. Just thinking up a new idea, no matter how cool an idea you may think it is, doesn't count. Not unless you actually implement it.
This game, however is going to suck.
Well, I wish I had your crystal ball to so assuredly declare this game a failure before it comes out. Me, I'll just wait and see. Maybe it will suck, but I respect anyone who actually gets a unique game concept like this pushed out the door. It's not easy to be different.
The third time you run off a pipe in midair because you can't see where the hell you are, you're going to throw this game away. I don't think the game is necessarily bad, but the execution being first person only just doesn't mesh with modern games or what modern gamers expect.
Have you consider that, working on this problem for years now, the developers just might have thought of some solutions to these problems that you haven't considered?
Perhaps if you had spent some of those 20 seconds reading the article, you might have run across this sentence:
Mike Swanson, a Microsoft technology evangelist working on the PDC, said earlier this week that attendees will receive a 160GB external USB hard drive that will contain all the developer bits from the conference. The USB drive will presumably include the pre-beta version of Windows 7.
So, this includes all the bits from the conference... this means a lot of video presentations, power-point presentations and images, along with (I'd presume) a number of SDKs, what have you...
The 160GB hard drive is in no way indicative of the final size of the Windows 7.
And I'll bet the sun will rise tomorrow. Both are equally safe bets.
Keep in mind that "bugs" can range from a very minor graphical glitch or even a gameplay issue that they don't think works as well as it could - all the way to crashing issues / data corruption, etc, the most serious sort. They're all bugs, and every modern games ships with a large number of them. Obviously, developers work very hard to fix all the highest priority issues, but they always go through a triage session and decide what's actually worth fixing and what bugs they can live with before the game ships. You're kidding yourselves if you think *any* game ships with zero bugs these days.
What a BS summary of the article. I generally don't RTFA but this time I did, and it revealed a seedy-as-I've-ever-seen summary. People aren't getting banned for talking about DRM. They are being banned for being jackasses when they talk about DRM.
Correct. It's way too sensationalist. The moderator (who was obviously just fed up but spoke out of line) was threatening to ban people for starting flame wars on the forums, but the official response:
"We are happy to support healthy exchanges on the forums. And people will only get banned for breaking the rules. Discussing DRM is not breaking the rules - and as long as it is a civil conversation, it's cool with us," said "Maxislucky".
Much less dramatic, no? I know DRM is nasty, but any sort of credibility of news reporting is lost when this happens. Maybe I'm becoming more aware of it, or maybe it's happening more and more. It's hard to say...
and do the same for any other DRM laden product, it'll teach the manufacturers quickly to stay away from DRM.
Or, they'll drop PC gaming and just move to consoles, where the DRM is just a part of the platform (make no mistake, I enjoy console gaming, but DRM is completely seamless and transparent on a console). I fear the wrong lessons will be learned unless people are also very clear about *why* they are not purchasing a particular product. The flipside to this is to reward the companies who produce products DRM free PC games with your voting dollars (or euros, pounds, whatever).
I think it's a bit discourteous to the scientists and engineers who actually designed this rover to say that, no matter what sort of programs NASA folks may have created for educational purposes.
It made the news... helped make the public a bit more aware of the problem, perhaps? I'd think it's better to focus on what you can change and affect instead of on what you can't.
I probably used a poor phrase to describe its success - my bad. But multiply the numbers (3 million subscribers at its peak) by the time Lineage has been around, and you'll see why I compared them as fairly similar in terms of industry impact. The point being, it was a very successful MMO, and it pre-dated WoW.
Just so you kno, a lot of those "WoW conventions" were pretty much invented by other games. World of Warcraft is simply the latest (and most successful to date) in a line of MMO titles that have evolved from common ancestry. Everquest used to be the game of choice. In Asian markets, Lineage had WoW-like numbers far before Blizzard had an MMO offering. And the first large-scale commercial MMO of significance here in the US was Ultima Online. And of course, all these games borrowed liberally from online text-only MUDs.
In a somewhat humorous twist, Blizzard is somewhat notorious for.. shall we say.. liberally borrowing concepts from the Warhammer universe. Not slamming Blizzard, they make awesome stuff, but please be aware the genre did not start with WoW.
I was just thinking the same thing... if they actually priced these things as "rentals" instead of pseudo-purchases, then I'd probably consider digital delivery. I may look into the Xbox's Netflix system. After all, who cares what happens to a rental? You just delete it when you need more room.
Or even better, make it a real product worth purchasing. I actually prefer to purchase movies I like, because then I can pull out an old movie from my library when I'm in the mood (and I often do). What's the incentive for me if I have to pay about the same price as I can order a physical disc from Amazon or (insert your online store of choice), while at the same time being locked to a game console? Give me the option to store my purchase on a custom-built media server (which I can backup myself), and you'd have yourself a new customer. I'll probably eventually rip my existing DVD library to do this anyhow. Why not do the planet (and hopefully my wallet in the process) a favor and skip the step of stamping digital bits onto metal and plastic and the cost of physically delivering it my doorstep?
I think the media corporations are so terrified of "piracy" that they are effectively pricing themselves out of any realistic market share in the digital realm. It's only going to be when someone breaks the mold and makes a crapload of money that they'll look into a better pricing and delivery scheme.
Unless "milk" is not a metaphor for something else, in that case, please do not elaborate.
The best business transactions are when parties exchange money for a product, and both feel good about the deal. That's normal, healthy economics at work. When consumers feel that a company simply takes advantage of previous successes and stops innovating, and starts diluting a previously successful brand in order to make a short-term profit, that's "milking".
This can have a negative effect with games with an online component, as old servers die out when sequels are released. And, with enough bad will generated, it can ultimately kill a franchise the player may love. We've seen EA (and, in fairness, other large publishers) purchase and subsequently kill popular franchises.
No one begrudges any developer or publisher continuing a successful franchise (indeed, fans are sometimes disgruntled when this doesn't happen). As with most things in life - it's all about moderation.
and in another way, I think you're being hypercritical
I hope you can tell I was just trying to be funny. I actually like id, and the work they do - at least from a technical standpoint. I just think it's slightly amusing that they're trying to re-define what "storytelling" means. Why not just own up to the fact that your games have been all about the action and cool technology? If you want to go a different direction, just say it.
if you want a good story, read a book be sensitive to games - they can't attract the talent for story telling because ultimately, if your good at writing stories, you wouldn't be working in the industry
I hear that a lot. Why do you feel games shouldn't tell stories? A story provides a great motivation for moving my character through the action. I absolutely love playing big, epic roleplaying game. And I really appreciate a story even in my action games - it simply adds another layer of enjoyment to the experience for me. If that's not your cup of tea, I won't diss it. But please, don't tell me how I should be enjoying my games.
And incidentally, I do happen to work in the industry. I'm a programmer myself, but just next door to me are a whole team of very talented writers (some of whom are published authors, and others I've worked with have gone on to careers writing novels). The two are not mutually exclusive.
I believe that many games have crappy writing not because studios often don't feel the need to hire professional writers. It's the reason you'll see a multi-million dollar production game come out with what looks like junior-high-level writing (I was going to say high school level, but that would be a bit insulting to any decent high school aged writer). I've seen time and time again the job of writing dialogue fall to the game designer, who may or may not be qualified to do this job. The industry is still finding its footing in these sorts of places. I've actually seen, from my admittedly small vantage point, an increase in demand for professional writers among game studios.
To help clarify, I'll translate some key excerpts:
FPS pioneer id Software doesn't exactly have a reputation rooted in strong game stories.
Here at id, we feel that any "story" beyond "here's a gun, shoot anything that moves" is for pansies.
Yes, in the past, we have developed games that have very limited narratives. But to say that a game with limited narrative has bad storytelling is really a narrow-minded approach to what storytelling is.
But it turns out that there are a lot of pansies out there, and it turns out they have money. So now I'm going to actually redefine what "storytelling" is in order to make it fit more nicely with what we've done in the past, and more importantly, what we'll be doing in the future.
Information, he maintains, is learned through experiences, and the experience of playing a game is what forms a narrative, by its nature.
See, here we go. "gameplay" ------>>> "storytelling"... Done!
The first and most important thing is start with a solid, straightforward plot.
*Really* straightforward. As in, get a gun, kill anything that moves. That counts, right?
Matt Castello, who penned the story for Doom 3...
I'll bet that napkin could be sold on eBay for a bundle!
If you've played Doom 3 you know that our pacing was pretty intense. It started up easy enough, but then we kicked up the intensity and kept it there for the whole game.
Non-stop hellspawn popping out of closets behind the player! It was insane, I tell you!
Broad stroke visuals really portray to the user about the wasteland, and what the authorities are trying to do to the wasteland. A character is not trying to tell you, 'Hey these guys are bad, look what they did to the wasteland.' You can see it for yourself."
You can tell this is going to be an innovative game, because we're going to be subtle. And also, we have a *wasteland*! How original is that? Seriously, it's not just dark dungeons and corridors - er, well, it's mostly that inside - but outside, it's a wasteland!
Willits says that Doom 3 players "zoomed right through" the game's highly handcrafted levels, so for Rage, "we have focused on reusability."
It takes an assload of time to hand-craft these levels. Appreciate them, damn you!
His bottom line for Rage? Delivering more choices and more variety for more people, while still delivering "classic id-style mayhem."
Don't worry, it will all come down to shooting everything that moves anyhow.
Hmm, I agree with many of your points, but I guess I was thinking of a slightly different definition of "gameplay".
What you're describing I'd tend to call game balance, not gameplay (not trying to be pedantic - I was just thinking of something different than you). Generally speaking, I consider gameplay to be the basic mechanics of how the game feels and plays, which I thought was very good. How the numbers are assigned, and the formulas used - I'd call that game balance, and yeah, it had a lot of problems.
Some of what you describe (points A and B) is a massive problem in many RPGs, not just KOTOR. That is, the idea of playing something other than a pure fighter, when combat tends to be the primary game mechanism. I've seen many games that allow you to sneak around the game, but in the end, throw you up against an end-boss in raw combat just like the fighter class (uh, WTH?). Even worse is when this happens (like in Kotor) as they take away the rest of your party (which you've likely chosen to help balance out those weaknesses). It happens so often that I've all but given up on non-melee classes in these sorts of games. They just NEVER seem to pan out well.
I'm a bit more forgiving to Kotor in regards to your points D) and E), because this essentially requires an active effort to break the game mechanics. If that's how you have fun, more power to you, but I tend to play along with the game, not try to do any bizarre min/maxing tricks, especially on the first go-round.
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I don't recall ever blocking an attack, to be honest, or any mechanism to do so. It's been a while since I played it, though. I'll probably pick it up and try again at some point.
Regardless, one could look at this in two ways: We're both talking about how "I did something wrong", but I apparently missed a crucial element of gameplay. One could also look at it as the game failing to introduce those concepts forcefully enough for thick-headed individuals like myself... although I seem to have no problem playing Disgaea 3.
Also, the way the game dealt with player deaths just seemed rather... bad. You just lost a fight, and you no longer have any of the items you used during that fight, but you apparently gained nothing (except knowledge, I guess). In fact - I believe you lost an achievement - if playing on Xbox Arcade version - if you die at all. I got into a cycle where I lost a few times in succession, and had no items to use then (which I used liberally to try to win said fight earlier). At that point, I was at a fairly severe disadvantage, and so put the game down and played something else.
We'll see how the second play attempt goes, I suppose, before I decide whether to buy another episode. I really did want to like this game.
It wasn't particularly hard either
Did I do something wrong, then? I was finding it fairly easy at first too. I played the game until I hit the urban "slum" area, and the first enemy I ran into killed me off with two hits. The hell? It's not exactly as though I can go anyplace else, or go back and grind up in levels... Best of all, when you die and respawn, (if I'm remembering correctly) you're missing all the items you burned through during the first battle. Makes for a nice downwards spiral.
I obviously missed something, but when a game smacks you in the face like that, I tend to shut it off and play something else. I have a lot less patience with this sort of thing than I did when I was 13, I guess. It's a shame, because I was really enjoying the game up to that point.
It's doubtful I'll be purchasing Episode II.
Or, we could just refuse to support DRM in *any* way, and watch it die a lingering, painful death.
Your suggestion is perfectly reasonably from a technical standpoint, but it grants DRM legitimacy in the consumer mind. I don't mean to be insensitive to individual's plights, but... painful lessons tend to be the best-learned lessons. If people realize that DRM'ed music is essentially held hostage by the sellers, and is therefore riskier to buy, than ultimately that's a good thing for moving things in a better direction - that is, sales of DRM-free digital products.
If you want real freedom, try chess or one of the games where the game play is not hard-coded in.
Huh? I'm pretty sure chess has a very finite set of rules. The gameplay is certainly "hard-coded" in. No mistake, I'm a big fan of chess, but I think perhaps you'd do better with a example such as "playing in a sandbox" - which, not coincidentally, is the typical analogy used for very open-ended games.
You're correct in principle, though. We're a long ways from achieving true freedom in games. Very little happens through truly emergent systems in games. Games such as GTA4, which give the player a vast amount of freedom, are created largely through brute force and scripted systems. Beyond the difficulty of even programming such a system, one big problem with truly emergent gameplay is testing coverage. If you have infinite possibilities, the possibility of a game-breaking combination becomes greater as well. This is why most games (both computer and other) traditionally attempt to simplify mechanics into a few easily understandable rules that simulate a system of greater complexity.
The WMA DRM protection system can explicitly allow or disallow users to burn CD audio from the encrypted files. It's not necessarily using the analog output, which would obviously have to be redigitized, resulting in further quality loss.
Also, they can't really stop the "analog hole" until they implant DRM-laden microchips in our ears, and forcibly encode all the world's audio sources. Or ban all consumer microphones and recording devices.
This would work, but I think that physics might have something to say about the potential return of energy that this device produced vs the amount of energy it consumes.
Remember that with carbon-based fuels, you're talking about releasing a large potential of energy already stored in the fuel itself. Any sort of energy expended to increase the efficiency of extraction can likely be powered by the fuel's untapped energy potential. It's really no different than how the burning of the fuel itself currently powers all fuel processing components require to feed the engine, such as pumps, fuel injectors, the ignition spark, etc. For example, adding a fuel injector, despite requiring additional power to pressurize the fuel (versus a carburetors), ends up releasing more net energy from the fuel.
I wondered when Clippy would resurface... Looks like he'll have a new job soon.
You should have seen the original incarnation of portal created by a bunch of european college students. they had no idea of the power of their concept. Their execution was decent for college students, but their game was just not the same experience as portal. Valve came along and recognized the power of that concept and put great designers on that project.
Just so you know... the precursor to Portal - Narbacular Drop - was developed by Digipen students (some of my co-workers were classmates of theirs actually). Valve then *hired those students*, who went on to create Portal.
I devised a concept a decade ago about a game based on escape and evade. The focus wasn't on combat, but being clever, skilled, and athletic.
About a million other gamers have also devised awesome game concepts. From someone in the game industry, let me offer a piece of unsolicited advice: Awesome game concepts are a dime a dozen. Solid execution of a concept is worth its weight in platinum. Just thinking up a new idea, no matter how cool an idea you may think it is, doesn't count. Not unless you actually implement it.
This game, however is going to suck.
Well, I wish I had your crystal ball to so assuredly declare this game a failure before it comes out. Me, I'll just wait and see. Maybe it will suck, but I respect anyone who actually gets a unique game concept like this pushed out the door. It's not easy to be different.
The third time you run off a pipe in midair because you can't see where the hell you are, you're going to throw this game away. I don't think the game is necessarily bad, but the execution being first person only just doesn't mesh with modern games or what modern gamers expect.
Right, a game that involved a lot of crazy movement through the environment would never work in first person, would it...
Have you consider that, working on this problem for years now, the developers just might have thought of some solutions to these problems that you haven't considered?
Perhaps if you had spent some of those 20 seconds reading the article, you might have run across this sentence:
Mike Swanson, a Microsoft technology evangelist working on the PDC, said earlier this week that attendees will receive a 160GB external USB hard drive that will contain all the developer bits from the conference. The USB drive will presumably include the pre-beta version of Windows 7.
So, this includes all the bits from the conference... this means a lot of video presentations, power-point presentations and images, along with (I'd presume) a number of SDKs, what have you...
The 160GB hard drive is in no way indicative of the final size of the Windows 7.
Oh, and my first harddrive was 20MB. :)
I'll bet the game ships with bugs.
And I'll bet the sun will rise tomorrow. Both are equally safe bets.
Keep in mind that "bugs" can range from a very minor graphical glitch or even a gameplay issue that they don't think works as well as it could - all the way to crashing issues / data corruption, etc, the most serious sort. They're all bugs, and every modern games ships with a large number of them. Obviously, developers work very hard to fix all the highest priority issues, but they always go through a triage session and decide what's actually worth fixing and what bugs they can live with before the game ships. You're kidding yourselves if you think *any* game ships with zero bugs these days.
What a BS summary of the article. I generally don't RTFA but this time I did, and it revealed a seedy-as-I've-ever-seen summary. People aren't getting banned for talking about DRM. They are being banned for being jackasses when they talk about DRM.
Correct. It's way too sensationalist. The moderator (who was obviously just fed up but spoke out of line) was threatening to ban people for starting flame wars on the forums, but the official response:
"We are happy to support healthy exchanges on the forums. And people will only get banned for breaking the rules. Discussing DRM is not breaking the rules - and as long as it is a civil conversation, it's cool with us," said "Maxislucky".
Much less dramatic, no? I know DRM is nasty, but any sort of credibility of news reporting is lost when this happens. Maybe I'm becoming more aware of it, or maybe it's happening more and more. It's hard to say...
and do the same for any other DRM laden product, it'll teach the manufacturers quickly to stay away from DRM.
Or, they'll drop PC gaming and just move to consoles, where the DRM is just a part of the platform (make no mistake, I enjoy console gaming, but DRM is completely seamless and transparent on a console). I fear the wrong lessons will be learned unless people are also very clear about *why* they are not purchasing a particular product. The flipside to this is to reward the companies who produce products DRM free PC games with your voting dollars (or euros, pounds, whatever).
I thought the original concept of Halo supposed to be an RTS (with online play of course), not an MMO.
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Pre_Xbox_Halo
The other choice is to be more selective in who you mate with.
So... How goes the hunt then, friend?
Wasn't Opporunity half-designed by kids as well?
I think it's a bit discourteous to the scientists and engineers who actually designed this rover to say that, no matter what sort of programs NASA folks may have created for educational purposes.
It made the news... helped make the public a bit more aware of the problem, perhaps? I'd think it's better to focus on what you can change and affect instead of on what you can't.
I probably used a poor phrase to describe its success - my bad. But multiply the numbers (3 million subscribers at its peak) by the time Lineage has been around, and you'll see why I compared them as fairly similar in terms of industry impact. The point being, it was a very successful MMO, and it pre-dated WoW.
Just so you kno, a lot of those "WoW conventions" were pretty much invented by other games. World of Warcraft is simply the latest (and most successful to date) in a line of MMO titles that have evolved from common ancestry. Everquest used to be the game of choice. In Asian markets, Lineage had WoW-like numbers far before Blizzard had an MMO offering. And the first large-scale commercial MMO of significance here in the US was Ultima Online. And of course, all these games borrowed liberally from online text-only MUDs.
In a somewhat humorous twist, Blizzard is somewhat notorious for.. shall we say.. liberally borrowing concepts from the Warhammer universe. Not slamming Blizzard, they make awesome stuff, but please be aware the genre did not start with WoW.
Penny Arcade summed it up best, of course: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/
If there is one thing good special effects have done is make bad sci-fi at least marginally entertaining (at least you can't see the strings anymore)
No, now you just see the CG. I'm not so sure I don't prefer strings and fireworks plugged into the back of toy rockets.
And btw, get off my lawn.
I was just thinking the same thing... if they actually priced these things as "rentals" instead of pseudo-purchases, then I'd probably consider digital delivery. I may look into the Xbox's Netflix system. After all, who cares what happens to a rental? You just delete it when you need more room.
Or even better, make it a real product worth purchasing. I actually prefer to purchase movies I like, because then I can pull out an old movie from my library when I'm in the mood (and I often do). What's the incentive for me if I have to pay about the same price as I can order a physical disc from Amazon or (insert your online store of choice), while at the same time being locked to a game console? Give me the option to store my purchase on a custom-built media server (which I can backup myself), and you'd have yourself a new customer. I'll probably eventually rip my existing DVD library to do this anyhow. Why not do the planet (and hopefully my wallet in the process) a favor and skip the step of stamping digital bits onto metal and plastic and the cost of physically delivering it my doorstep?
I think the media corporations are so terrified of "piracy" that they are effectively pricing themselves out of any realistic market share in the digital realm. It's only going to be when someone breaks the mold and makes a crapload of money that they'll look into a better pricing and delivery scheme.
No. Can you elaborate on the difference?
Unless "milk" is not a metaphor for something else, in that case, please do not elaborate.
The best business transactions are when parties exchange money for a product, and both feel good about the deal. That's normal, healthy economics at work. When consumers feel that a company simply takes advantage of previous successes and stops innovating, and starts diluting a previously successful brand in order to make a short-term profit, that's "milking".
This can have a negative effect with games with an online component, as old servers die out when sequels are released. And, with enough bad will generated, it can ultimately kill a franchise the player may love. We've seen EA (and, in fairness, other large publishers) purchase and subsequently kill popular franchises.
No one begrudges any developer or publisher continuing a successful franchise (indeed, fans are sometimes disgruntled when this doesn't happen). As with most things in life - it's all about moderation.
and in another way, I think you're being hypercritical
I hope you can tell I was just trying to be funny. I actually like id, and the work they do - at least from a technical standpoint. I just think it's slightly amusing that they're trying to re-define what "storytelling" means. Why not just own up to the fact that your games have been all about the action and cool technology? If you want to go a different direction, just say it.
if you want a good story, read a book
be sensitive to games - they can't attract the talent for story telling because ultimately, if your good at writing stories, you wouldn't be working in the industry
I hear that a lot. Why do you feel games shouldn't tell stories? A story provides a great motivation for moving my character through the action. I absolutely love playing big, epic roleplaying game. And I really appreciate a story even in my action games - it simply adds another layer of enjoyment to the experience for me. If that's not your cup of tea, I won't diss it. But please, don't tell me how I should be enjoying my games.
And incidentally, I do happen to work in the industry. I'm a programmer myself, but just next door to me are a whole team of very talented writers (some of whom are published authors, and others I've worked with have gone on to careers writing novels). The two are not mutually exclusive.
I believe that many games have crappy writing not because studios often don't feel the need to hire professional writers. It's the reason you'll see a multi-million dollar production game come out with what looks like junior-high-level writing (I was going to say high school level, but that would be a bit insulting to any decent high school aged writer). I've seen time and time again the job of writing dialogue fall to the game designer, who may or may not be qualified to do this job. The industry is still finding its footing in these sorts of places. I've actually seen, from my admittedly small vantage point, an increase in demand for professional writers among game studios.
To help clarify, I'll translate some key excerpts:
FPS pioneer id Software doesn't exactly have a reputation rooted in strong game stories.
Here at id, we feel that any "story" beyond "here's a gun, shoot anything that moves" is for pansies.
Yes, in the past, we have developed games that have very limited narratives. But to say that a game with limited narrative has bad storytelling is really a narrow-minded approach to what storytelling is.
But it turns out that there are a lot of pansies out there, and it turns out they have money. So now I'm going to actually redefine what "storytelling" is in order to make it fit more nicely with what we've done in the past, and more importantly, what we'll be doing in the future.
Information, he maintains, is learned through experiences, and the experience of playing a game is what forms a narrative, by its nature.
See, here we go. "gameplay" ------>>> "storytelling"... Done!
The first and most important thing is start with a solid, straightforward plot.
*Really* straightforward. As in, get a gun, kill anything that moves. That counts, right?
Matt Castello, who penned the story for Doom 3...
I'll bet that napkin could be sold on eBay for a bundle!
If you've played Doom 3 you know that our pacing was pretty intense. It started up easy enough, but then we kicked up the intensity and kept it there for the whole game.
Non-stop hellspawn popping out of closets behind the player! It was insane, I tell you!
Broad stroke visuals really portray to the user about the wasteland, and what the authorities are trying to do to the wasteland. A character is not trying to tell you, 'Hey these guys are bad, look what they did to the wasteland.' You can see it for yourself."
You can tell this is going to be an innovative game, because we're going to be subtle. And also, we have a *wasteland*! How original is that? Seriously, it's not just dark dungeons and corridors - er, well, it's mostly that inside - but outside, it's a wasteland!
Willits says that Doom 3 players "zoomed right through" the game's highly handcrafted levels, so for Rage, "we have focused on reusability."
It takes an assload of time to hand-craft these levels. Appreciate them, damn you!
His bottom line for Rage? Delivering more choices and more variety for more people, while still delivering "classic id-style mayhem."
Don't worry, it will all come down to shooting everything that moves anyhow.
Hmm, I agree with many of your points, but I guess I was thinking of a slightly different definition of "gameplay".
What you're describing I'd tend to call game balance, not gameplay (not trying to be pedantic - I was just thinking of something different than you). Generally speaking, I consider gameplay to be the basic mechanics of how the game feels and plays, which I thought was very good. How the numbers are assigned, and the formulas used - I'd call that game balance, and yeah, it had a lot of problems.
Some of what you describe (points A and B) is a massive problem in many RPGs, not just KOTOR. That is, the idea of playing something other than a pure fighter, when combat tends to be the primary game mechanism. I've seen many games that allow you to sneak around the game, but in the end, throw you up against an end-boss in raw combat just like the fighter class (uh, WTH?). Even worse is when this happens (like in Kotor) as they take away the rest of your party (which you've likely chosen to help balance out those weaknesses). It happens so often that I've all but given up on non-melee classes in these sorts of games. They just NEVER seem to pan out well.
I'm a bit more forgiving to Kotor in regards to your points D) and E), because this essentially requires an active effort to break the game mechanics. If that's how you have fun, more power to you, but I tend to play along with the game, not try to do any bizarre min/maxing tricks, especially on the first go-round.