DICE Exec: Military Shooter Market Isn't Oversaturated

Mikeyfell

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Aug 24, 2010
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As... um, interesting as this is.

It's still wrong.

It's not (Strictly speaking) "the military shooter" that's over saturated. It's the "Cover based shooter" regardless of Genera that's over saturated.



Make more Mirror's Edge games! You literally can't go wrong with making those. Everyone will love you if you make a yearly incarnation of Mirror's Edge with basically the same gameplay and updated maps to run around on.

It would be BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!!
 

Mr Cwtchy

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Jan 13, 2009
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Largely, I agree. Honestly I've always thought there aren't as many military shooter games out there as people on this site make it out to be(I'd put that down to Yahtzee particularly).
 

Izanagi009_v1legacy

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Apr 25, 2013
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CyberMachinist said:
Izanagi009 said:
RatherDull said:
There's a lot more you can do with Sci-fi than modern.
agreed but I would argue that a lot of developers aren't willing to change their gun design. I point to Titanfall; the weapons used by the titans themselves are unique with a magnetic redirect shield and arc cannons but the foot soldier weapons themselves seem like reskins or slight modifications of current mms weapons. The assault rifle is basically a SCAR with a different scope and the only significant weapon redesign I saw was the rocket launcher which was clip-based, carried like a assault rifle and with smaller rockets than normal 21th century launchers. This is a game world that has enough technology for warp engines, space travel, and mecha. Why hasen't the technology for infantry weapons changed from our current ones?
Kind of makes you wish more guns like the ones from Unreal Tournament and Doom would see the limelight, personally i don't mind realistic weapons (probably work like antiques in the setting or something)in the genre but i would prefer they only make about 10 or 5% of the actual weaponry available,

C'mon why haven't they tried to at least make some new weapon types, like say some warp device that materializes objects or raw materials to deal with enemies?
This world has arc cannons and magnetic reflector shields so why aren't these technologies being used for infantry. At the very least, make exosuits that provide a fraction of the capabilities of the titan but with weapons different from the usual shotgun, rifle, pistol
 

Username Redacted

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I think he's both right and wrong. The market for generic emotionally dead crap like CoD (anything after Modern Warfare 1) and MoH: Warfighter (hahahahahahahahahahahahaha) is super-saturated. I mean it kind of looks like publishers are starting to get it that their game won't be the next CoD. So in this sense the man is very much wrong. We very much do have too many CoD clones running about. On the other hand if a shooter wants to try to and tell me a story like Spec Ops: The Line (ideally with better controls) then it is more than welcome in my home. So, I guess, as per usual (in any genre) the market for games with decent writing is under served.
 

TheSapphireKnight

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Dec 4, 2008
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I don't think the setting is the issue. Its the gameplay. My 'fatigue' with shooters tends to come from the gameplay. Lots of shooters seem to be following the same pattern of arcade loadout multiplayer and linear setpiece single players.

The issue seems to be that a lot of games may have a distinct multiplayer, the single player may follow the status quo or vice-versa. Battlefield has a distinct multiplayer component with 64 player vehicle madness, but the single player in BC2 and BF3 unfortunately had the linear setpiece blah blah that didn't take advantage of all the tools the series has available. Compare this to the first Bad Company where the levels were very open and taught you how to use just about every bit of equipment for multiplayer.

On the other hand we had things like Halo 4 where the single player was traditional Halo, the multiplayer has been infected with the same choose your loadout, instant respawn, killstreaks, etc of modern shooters.
 

Azure Knight-Zeo

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I think he kinda has a point, most shooters at E3 where sci-fi after all. However the problem with MMS games is that they're all basicly the same, after you've played Modern Warfare 1 you've basicly played them all. Sci-fi games on the other hand can have different settings, gameplay gimmicks, and design aesthetics that can make (most) of them feel radicly different from each other. For MMSs the only real differences are whether the main bad guys you're fighting are the Russians or Not-Al-Kaida.
 

BloodSquirrel

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You know, the over-saturation isn't just for the MMS genre itself, it's for the audience that the MMS is aimed at. It's the whole "cinematic" shooter paradigm that's become over-saturated. Taking all of the exact same tropes and moving to sci-fi isn't going to increase the size of that market by much.
 

Daaaah Whoosh

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I think the oversaturation is more about the gameplay than the setting. Sure, there aren't too many MMSs out there any more, but there are quite a lot of FPS games with a highly linear campaign featuring scripted explosions and on-rails driving sections, where the main characters form a squad that gets in over their heads with some big conspiracy, or some bad guy that has his own personal army and usually some kind of bomb.
 

Weaver

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Apr 28, 2008
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Bindal said:
AC10 said:
Bust most of these "sci-fi" games are just MMS games with a very, very thin coat of "pretty soon in the future". If 90% of the weapons in a game are still guns that shoot regular bullets, your game isn't very sci-fi.
Thanks to a very basic physical law, shooting bullets will actually NEVER go out of fashion.
Heck, even in HALO (you know, 2552 onwards), they still use bullets.

AC10 said:
Also... maybe I'm not paying attention, but how many sci-fi games are we REALLY getting here? Why can't I think of any? Besides the shitty star trek game, what sci-fi game have we got this year so far?
If we say "one year" as "past 12 months" while only using first- and third-person shooter, it is:
Defiance, Halo, Star Trek, Black Ops 2, Sanctum 2 (partially, as it is primarely a first-person tower defense), Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, ShootMania Storm,...

Just to name a few.
Shooting big noisy bullets is impractical because they need oxygen to function. And if your game is actually sci-fi, the odds of having to go to other worlds; maybe say, one without an atmosphere, or one without oxygen, is high. And if you can't invent an in universe way to have a cool gun via, you know, using science to produce a fictional weapon, then you should go back to the drawing board.

We already have electrically-powered centrifuge based weapons which have ridiculous firing rates (120,000 rounds per minute), have no recoil and produce no muzzle flash.

More to the point, an FPS that's in the future is not sci-fi. I wouldn't count Black Ops, Blood Dragon or Shootmania as Sci-Fi. "In the future" does not make something science fiction, it makes it in the future. Blood Dragon in particular lends more to the 80s technofuture vision of the world than anything actually science fiction. But hey, I could let it pass I guess. I would also say something really needs to have a fleshed out world to truly be science fiction. Just putting you in a room with future guns and no context is more taking thematic elements from sci-fi than actually making a sci-fi game.

My problem is, if shooting a guy in the head with an M16 with some glowy bits on it to make it look futuristic is the best your writing team cam come up with, your game really isn't much of a sci-fi game to me Let me use cool future gadgets, or fly space ships, or meet aliens or... something!
 

HellbirdIV

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Steven Bogos said:
"I think great franchises stay where they think they should stay. You see Halo being sci-fi for many, many years, and now everyone else is doing sci-fi. So now it's like, 'well, now it's boring because everyone else is doing it.'"
Hey isn't DICE making the next Star Wars: Battlefront game?
 

Gray Firion

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Mar 5, 2012
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Sigh, I'm starting to notice a trend here myself.

"Oh look. The opinion and tastes of our demographic is shifting! We must go online and say misleading things hoping someone does what we want so we don't have to adapt accordingly!"

That's... partly a subversion of humanity. Life itself actually. When the Ecosystem changes, you don't tell the Ecosystem to stop and behave as if it's a spoiled child. Or If it's raining, you don't look up and tell the sky to hold it. You observe the Ecosystem and find another way to fulfill your needs, if it's raining you get inside a building faster.

Sci-fi isn't getting saturated. It isn't seeing more titles just now, it has ALWAYS seen more titles in videogames because you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want there. Artificial Inteligences? Sure. Alien species? Sounds about right. Laser crossbows? Knock yourself out. Lightsabers? Yes please. It's pure fiction, you're not beholden to make every title like Halo, and in fact, people don't: Some settings have different species; in others the way human beings live or interact is different; in some cases, humanity is removed altogether and a completely different species, different culture and everything that implies are the protagonists; among others. It's called Science Fiction for a reason.

But Spunk Gargle Wee Wee's? You play one of them and done, commit it to memory and you've seen them all. Guns won't change, the reason for the portrayed conflict is always something like terrorism or a country starting an arms/supplying race, everything is a shade of brown/gray, the characters you interact with have as much personality as a cardboard, among others. Rules are so rigid in a SGWW that if you break a single one, it actively STOPS being a Spunk Gargle Wee Wee game, which is a term that has more personality than most of the titles it portrays, because it's funny. The single time I've seen someone do anything at all different with SGWW's was Spec Ops: The Line, by viciously deconstructing the genre, the protagonists and even the players.

SGWW is a Mold. You've seen it once, you know what you're in for. In SciFi? There's a single rule: Something central to the setting must be as of yet undiscovered by mankind, from something simple as a new fuel source, to something extreme as the Setting being in a different Stellar System, or Galaxy.

No, you're keeping Battlefield as a SGWW because it's one of the only 2 series that profit in that genre. That's fine, you want money. But don't look at everyone else moving away and say they're doing it wrong. If you hadn't been as lucky, you'd be doing the exact same thing.

And then, you'd probably go online, saying something like "Modern Military Shooter games don't work, it's a dying genre".
 

Gray Firion

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HellbirdIV said:
Steven Bogos said:
"I think great franchises stay where they think they should stay. You see Halo being sci-fi for many, many years, and now everyone else is doing sci-fi. So now it's like, 'well, now it's boring because everyone else is doing it.'"
Hey isn't DICE making the next Star Wars: Battlefront game?
Damn, you're right, didn't remember this. Yeah, they're already doing the same "everyone else" is doing.

The Hipocrisy is Strong in this one. -.-
 

CyberMachinist

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Izanagi009 said:
This world has arc cannons and magnetic reflector shields so why aren't these technologies being used for infantry. At the very least, make exosuits that provide a fraction of the capabilities of the titan but with weapons different from the usual shotgun, rifle, pistol
The guys that greenlight these games Don't even know why Sci-fi Is called Science-Fiction, pretty sure they think giving us some external unorthodox gear that doesn't apply to infantry is good enough for us to believe it counts as a Sci-fi game.

They fail to realize that in this genre you can make whatever you want as long as it can at least be somewhat considered scientifically feasible depending on the setting or what materials are available, either that or they just want to reuse some resources that can be ported over to the game to reduce work and cost.

Oh and i got a suggestion for that last idea..... Anyone think shrapnel launching electric chain-whips? Think something along the lines of the whips whiplash use.
 

Terramax

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To all those who believe MMS' are the most oversaturated genre on the market - count the number of JRPGs or racing games on the shelves.

I rest my case.
 

CJ1145

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Jan 6, 2009
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Considering literally anything with a futuristic bent or any fantastic elements which are grounded in science (or things that are science-ish as opposed to magic) is "sci-fi", that's by definition one of the broadest and largest genres in any form of media. So, he doesn't actually have much of a point at all. MMS is a very narrow, very defined genre, and yet they still dominate the market like Master Chief's genetically-enhanced testicles dominate the faces of any poor saps he's killed in a multiplayer match. That is the definition of oversaturation.
 

Yuuki

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Mar 19, 2013
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Sorry but is there an ounce of sense in this fucking thread?

A company that has been making military shooters since 2002 continues to stay strong with their preferred genre, continues to give their colossal fanbase what they've been wanting, continues improving and expanding their game, continues to prove that the genre is far from stale...and people are hating them for doing it?

You mean to say that you, sitting here in your tiny minorities, can out-vocalize and out-demand the MILLIONS of people out there who want a better & improved Battlefield game from DICE? And what, DICE is supposed to listen to you and dump their extremely successful franchise in the gutter and pursue new IP instead of just refining and improving what they've got? Because a bunch of people on forums told them to?

Crazies, the lot of you.

Finally there's the idiocy of calling a game like Battlefield 3/4 a "military shooter" and leaving it at that, when a huge part of the game involves learning and mastering things like Jets, Helicopters, Tanks and Boats. If you don't see the fun in flying a Jet up into the sky, killing a Helicopter, getting a singer missile locked on your ass, bailing out of the jet, parachuting down, landing near a boat, riding the boat around and gunning enemies (and enemy boats) down, bailing from that into a JetSki, running over stragglers swimming in the water and getting kills, grounding that into land, sneaking up to an enemy tank and placing C4 on it, blowing it up...
I mean the game can essentially be a Tank simulator or Flight simulator (to the level of HAWX, except even better) and people have the nerve to point at Battlefield 3/4 saying "boooo it's just another MMS!"?

Of course it's "just another MMS", you've never fucking played it and never will play it, so you'll never find out what it is and continue to make blanket statements that mean nothing.
 

Aiddon_v1legacy

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still doesn't detract from military shooters struggling to do anything new within themselves aside from more people in a multiplayer session.
 

Doom972

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As I read those arguments claiming that the spunkgargleweewee market isn't over-saturated, I was thinking that he might have a point, until he mentioned Halo as a prime example of a Sci-Fi shooter. At that point he lost all credibility.

Half Life was the right example.
 

Yuuki

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Aiddon said:
still doesn't detract from military shooters struggling to do anything new within themselves aside from more people in a multiplayer session.
"More people in a multiplayer session". Did you...did you even read my post?