E3 Killjoy 2010
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
You were already ninjaed.Caliostro said:
What I can't tell you is if people like Hyper-Space here are fans of the original or not. But I kinda doubt it. There's nothing wrong with "revitalizing" a franchise, but, yeah, there's nothing here but the name, it's like resurrecting your lost love as a zombie. Why do it at all?Hyper-space said:
It could just be my own paranoia, but, my impression is something has gone horribly horribly wrong here. I remember when Oblivion got a hands on at it's last E3. There it was, go anywhere, do anything, just don't go through the oblivion gates. Granted Bethesda and Bioware are very different companies with very different design philosophies, but, the "hands-on" ToR received a couple months ago, and then this at E3? Either Bioware thinks they're the best thing since the Beatles, or something's gone horribly wrong, and they're scrambling to cover their asses.Caliostro said:
I cut the part on motion controls because I had nothing to add.
Kotor's on the edge. The pacing is a wreck, you spend (on average) eight hours kicking around the first planet before you get to the Jedi stuff, and the meat of the game. Even then you have another 2 - 4 hours of locked in content before you can start wandering the galaxy.Caliostro said:
The gameplay is (mostly) faithful to D20, which is to say, more than a tad bit random, which means you spend a lot of time not hitting anyone. It doesn't have the fluidity of NWN nor the role-playing depth of Kotor2.
From a roleplaying standpoint you're stuck with the Bioware standards of either being a humorless stick in the mud with almost no personality (also known as lawful stupid) or choosing chaotic
On a character standpoint we have Bastila, who has carbon copied her personality of Aribeth while becoming, strangely, even more annoying and self righteous. And who is so popular around the Bioware offices they decided to put her in every subsequent game except Mass Effect 1. And Carth, the whinny neurotic whackjob of a pilot.
So, all KotOR really has going is really the Sixth Sense reveal, which works about as well as it did in the Sixth Sense.
Jedi Outcast and Academy are also wrecks. Though Academy is something of an improvement as it lets you avoid some of the more bullshit maps if you want.
"Twenty years ago we didn't have force feedback, pressure-sensitive buttons, or thumbsticks."
It was 20 years ago that Mouse and keyboard first came into use in Computer Games (1990) and no advance in console controls I've seen since offer any tangible advantage over that setup.
I'll agree analogue sticks have been an improvement but I only ever found force-feedback (rumble) as distracting, extremely rare is it ever useful and certainly doesn't add to the immersion in a game. Muscle memory is vital for fast controls, rumble disrupts that with varying sensory feedback, the button press and hold should always feel the same.
Also don't see the benefit of pressure sensitive buttons. MGS2 used pressure sensitive buttons to AIM with soft press and Fire with hard press but it was a pain in the arse. Buttons clearly don't benefit as much from being pressure sensitive. Much better to make them as crisp and easiest to press quickly, rapidly with the best timing.
Analogue triggers seem to be an improvement but ONLY if for Analogue/Continuous input like acceleration or braking (not attacks like triggers pulls, those are discrete binary actions). Though Racing Wheels and pedals have been used in gaming almost as long (since early 90's).
Yeah, 20 years and hardly any improvement in control interfaces at all, or at least that's the way I see it. Just different plugs/sockets and slight improvement in precision from new sensors.
It was 20 years ago that Mouse and keyboard first came into use in Computer Games (1990) and no advance in console controls I've seen since offer any tangible advantage over that setup.
I'll agree analogue sticks have been an improvement but I only ever found force-feedback (rumble) as distracting, extremely rare is it ever useful and certainly doesn't add to the immersion in a game. Muscle memory is vital for fast controls, rumble disrupts that with varying sensory feedback, the button press and hold should always feel the same.
Also don't see the benefit of pressure sensitive buttons. MGS2 used pressure sensitive buttons to AIM with soft press and Fire with hard press but it was a pain in the arse. Buttons clearly don't benefit as much from being pressure sensitive. Much better to make them as crisp and easiest to press quickly, rapidly with the best timing.
Analogue triggers seem to be an improvement but ONLY if for Analogue/Continuous input like acceleration or braking (not attacks like triggers pulls, those are discrete binary actions). Though Racing Wheels and pedals have been used in gaming almost as long (since early 90's).
Yeah, 20 years and hardly any improvement in control interfaces at all, or at least that's the way I see it. Just different plugs/sockets and slight improvement in precision from new sensors.
That page you linked to prove the Kinect doesn't come with any games and costs $150 doesn't say any of that.
For one thing, it says nothing about cost, and for another, there is nothing there that says what is packaged with the device.
I'm sure 5 months before the Xbox 360 came out they didn't have details on what individual games would be packaged with each version of the console, and to show absence of detail as proof of absence of package deals just doesn't really make sense.
For one thing, it says nothing about cost, and for another, there is nothing there that says what is packaged with the device.
I'm sure 5 months before the Xbox 360 came out they didn't have details on what individual games would be packaged with each version of the console, and to show absence of detail as proof of absence of package deals just doesn't really make sense.
The big Nintendo stuff was all about the 3DS, and I just don't use portables. My hands are too big and the screens are too tiny and I never leave the house anyway.Not G. Ivingname said:
They're just not on my radar.
Halfway down the page. Expand the "what comes in the box" thing.DarthLurtz said:
The $150 price tag was covered here earlier this week.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/101444-Retailers-Guess-150-Price-for-Kinect
And even if the Kinect came with "Wii Sports" (or whatever they're calling it) $150 is just too dang much for a controller if they're hoping to steal the Wii market.
Ok...Shamus Young said:
But you still didn't mention any of the wii exclusives like Kirby: Epic Yarn or the Goldeneye Remake.
Yeah, I saw that part. But nothing has been confirmed yet by Microsoft either for the possibility of a bundle, or for what the price will be, so even with all of these stores guessing about it, there aren't really any solid facts on the subject.
And that's $50 more dollars for the Wii (if we go for the rumored price), but without the need to ever buy another accessory. (Adding a second wiimote and nunchuck would cost $60)
So going with the theory that Kinect is $150.00 with no games, you'd pay $150 for Kinect and $40 for one of the minigames, or $260 for A Wii and two controllers.
$50 less than a Wii for the same amount of stuff. It's only an add-on, but if you already own an Xbox, you're golden.
And that's $50 more dollars for the Wii (if we go for the rumored price), but without the need to ever buy another accessory. (Adding a second wiimote and nunchuck would cost $60)
So going with the theory that Kinect is $150.00 with no games, you'd pay $150 for Kinect and $40 for one of the minigames, or $260 for A Wii and two controllers.
$50 less than a Wii for the same amount of stuff. It's only an add-on, but if you already own an Xbox, you're golden.
I tend to agree with most of what you said other than the bit about "Old Republic" because as people have shown, there is plenty of game play footage out there. Still, I DO admit that we're not seeming a demonstration of a lot of the more esoteric features they mention, which gives me a sort of "Age Of Conan" vibe where it seems 90% of what they were hyping turned out to be a lie.
The new X-com seems pathetic to be honest. Truthfully the third X-com game DID take place in a sort of odd retro-future city, but given that game was more or less a train wreck it surprises me they want to revisit that vibe. I suspect they simply want to use the franchise name to get attention, and are hoping to try and cash in on the vibe popularized by "Fallout" and "Bioshock".
To some extent I think we can blame "Fallout 3" for this. Fallout 3 was a REALLY good game but more or less butchered 99% of what Fallout was about despite being presented as a sequel. This is something that has been upsetting RPG fans for a while (as I'm sure we're all aware). I'm guessing the guys doing X-com also figure that they can butcher 99% of X-Com, turn it from a strategy game into a pseudo shooter themselves (sort of like Fallout 3 did) and haul that nostolgia cash away in dump trucks. What's more I think that we're going to see more and more of this in upcoming years because of this one game that did well.
I'd also point out this is not the first attempt to do an action based X-com game, we've also seen "X-com: Enforcer" which was ANOTHER train wreck.
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Oh and one final note, a good portion of what "Old Republic Online" is promising has been done before. The bit about having your own followers seems easily workable based on what we've seen with "Sword Of The New World" (which had some neat ideas, but was a horrendous cash grab) and the cancelled "Gods and Heroes" game which I was in beta for before it went down.
Age Of Conan also managed to deliver on the dialogue filled cut scenes and such, at least during the intro area. I'm guessing what "Old Republic" is promising is to do that for the entire game, and recording all of the dialoge and such is probably a good part of why the development is taking so long.
Honestly my concerns over "Old Republic" have been balance based. It seems to be being set up to make playing the good guys a giant jip yet again. Almost everything released so far has been a glorified Sith cheerleading section. This ranges from the cinematics, to most of the gameplay footage. Not only do the Jedi/good guys get whomped on heavily (even in the latest trailer the Sith are *much* cooler and apparently more effective, even if the good guys win in the end), but the characters are also VERY generic compared to the bad guys.
Right now it seems a lot like what hurt "Warhammer Online" where everyone one Destruction because Destruction was simply much cooler, much more powerful, and much better/more interestingly developed. You could see this coming for months and it was proven beyond a doubt when you saw the numbers in the "Road to war" promotion.
The point of this rambling is that I am really looking forward to this game, but for all of the "pure awesome" it radiates at time, I also get a feeling of deja vu. People are right to be critical of this game, but not for the reasons most people are focusing on.
"World Of Warcraft" got away with Alliance being "one of the biggest gips in gaming" (to quote Penny Arcade) because it was the first game of it's kind to take the factional approach, and honestly it took people a long time to figure out the problems, and by then it was really too late to fix anything in an effective fashion because of pure inertia. When it comes to new games though people are going to be more picky, and look for these problems. To put it into perspective people didn't tolerate it the same way when it came to "Warhammer" in part because players figured the developers should have known better, and there are simply tons of other games out there right now.
My #1 concern is "Old Republic" dying due to "Alliance Syndrome" so to speak.
The new X-com seems pathetic to be honest. Truthfully the third X-com game DID take place in a sort of odd retro-future city, but given that game was more or less a train wreck it surprises me they want to revisit that vibe. I suspect they simply want to use the franchise name to get attention, and are hoping to try and cash in on the vibe popularized by "Fallout" and "Bioshock".
To some extent I think we can blame "Fallout 3" for this. Fallout 3 was a REALLY good game but more or less butchered 99% of what Fallout was about despite being presented as a sequel. This is something that has been upsetting RPG fans for a while (as I'm sure we're all aware). I'm guessing the guys doing X-com also figure that they can butcher 99% of X-Com, turn it from a strategy game into a pseudo shooter themselves (sort of like Fallout 3 did) and haul that nostolgia cash away in dump trucks. What's more I think that we're going to see more and more of this in upcoming years because of this one game that did well.
I'd also point out this is not the first attempt to do an action based X-com game, we've also seen "X-com: Enforcer" which was ANOTHER train wreck.
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Oh and one final note, a good portion of what "Old Republic Online" is promising has been done before. The bit about having your own followers seems easily workable based on what we've seen with "Sword Of The New World" (which had some neat ideas, but was a horrendous cash grab) and the cancelled "Gods and Heroes" game which I was in beta for before it went down.
Age Of Conan also managed to deliver on the dialogue filled cut scenes and such, at least during the intro area. I'm guessing what "Old Republic" is promising is to do that for the entire game, and recording all of the dialoge and such is probably a good part of why the development is taking so long.
Honestly my concerns over "Old Republic" have been balance based. It seems to be being set up to make playing the good guys a giant jip yet again. Almost everything released so far has been a glorified Sith cheerleading section. This ranges from the cinematics, to most of the gameplay footage. Not only do the Jedi/good guys get whomped on heavily (even in the latest trailer the Sith are *much* cooler and apparently more effective, even if the good guys win in the end), but the characters are also VERY generic compared to the bad guys.
Right now it seems a lot like what hurt "Warhammer Online" where everyone one Destruction because Destruction was simply much cooler, much more powerful, and much better/more interestingly developed. You could see this coming for months and it was proven beyond a doubt when you saw the numbers in the "Road to war" promotion.
The point of this rambling is that I am really looking forward to this game, but for all of the "pure awesome" it radiates at time, I also get a feeling of deja vu. People are right to be critical of this game, but not for the reasons most people are focusing on.
"World Of Warcraft" got away with Alliance being "one of the biggest gips in gaming" (to quote Penny Arcade) because it was the first game of it's kind to take the factional approach, and honestly it took people a long time to figure out the problems, and by then it was really too late to fix anything in an effective fashion because of pure inertia. When it comes to new games though people are going to be more picky, and look for these problems. To put it into perspective people didn't tolerate it the same way when it came to "Warhammer" in part because players figured the developers should have known better, and there are simply tons of other games out there right now.
My #1 concern is "Old Republic" dying due to "Alliance Syndrome" so to speak.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who picked up on this. (My experience with AoC was a couple months ago, so I can't comment on that, sorry.)Therumancer said:
I'm not completely convinced, I mean, in theory, yeah, and you're probably right. But Fallout 3 at least attempted to preserve the setting of the Fallout games. It bjorked it up pretty baddly, but it was still a post-apocalyptic wasteland with deathclaws, super mutants and Brotherhood of Steel wandering about.Therumancer said:
This looks like all that's been carried over is Aliens and the name. So if there's a Fallout analogy to be made, I suspect the XBox/PS2 action game is probably a better fit as an analogy... except it wasn't successful...
*Clutches his head and whimpers*Therumancer said:
For that matter Star Trek Online, Guild Wars and D&D Online all have NPC followers. STO and GW both allow you to develop them and customize them to your liking. (I'm not sure about DDO)Therumancer said:
It also suggests, and this is just my crackpot theory here, that the amount of content for TOR will always be anemic. If you're going to be burning that much money for every update, the game's dev cycle will grind to a halt. And, in this, MMOs are like Sharks: if they stop updating they drown and die.Therumancer said:
I find it a little hard to believe that Bioware's really ready to simply let the game's dev cycle keep running indefinitely.
To an extent that might be the license shooting them in the foot. Visually the villains of Star Wars have always been interesting than the heroes. Not that this helps Bioware or the game in the slightest, it's just an observation.Therumancer said:
Having not played Warhammer Online, I'm guessing Distruction was the faction that included Greenskins, Dark Elves and Chaos?Therumancer said:
Conceptually this might work if it was executed the way LotR Online handled monster characters, or STO handled (initially) Klingons, but, I'm guessing that's not the case.
EDIT: The editing in that earlier block of yours wasn't to be snarky, I was honestly having a hard time parsing what you wrote. If I got it wrong, then I apologize.
The pure awesomeness is taunting me with it's potential, I'm just not sure it will deliver.Therumancer said:
Okay, please forgive my ignorance, but, what is "Alliance Syndrome?"Therumancer said:
Would all this bullshit be solved if they just changed the Name to something completely different from XCOM... it's not like it is Verboten in gaming to change a name of something pre-release and post-announcement.Dexter111 said:Would you stop knocking X-COM already? Jeez
It's like all you people forgot X-COM Interceptor, X-COM Enforcer or all the UFO titles that followed them till up to 2007 like UFO Afterlight, UFO Aftermath, UFO Aftershock and UFO Extraterrestrials...
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/43c9c484984929]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/985aca84984930]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/1a933b84984922]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/47e05e84984924]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/bc0db084984925]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/88007784984926]
X-COM is a brand that has been "run into the ground" already, and they can't destroy anything that was destroyed already, it looks like a legitimately good game in its own right and might surprise some of you...
Also, read this article (click the images to enlarge), it'll make you feel better about the game:
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/c4ecca84224247]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/a2cd5f84224302]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/c0c9cb84224351]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/cf8e6784224441]
[http://www.imagebam.com/image/539df284224493]
Change it to... I don't know... "G-men Verses the Space Goo", whatever.
I mean if:
-The name is different
-the details are different
-the developers aren't even the same
Just treat it like any of the other run of the mill shooters of which about 20 come out each year.
In fact, even if the name doesn't change, you should. It's just a name.
Although with Valve's ridonkulous price cuts, we're not really complaining. It's half off, yeah, but half of $4 is still only $2 less. XDMr. Mike said:
Also, Shamus, I noticed you didn't mention any of Nintendo's utter failures at E3...which is good, because they didn't have any (maybe Miyamoto failing at Zelda, but w/e). Having you confirm their exceptional performance through exemption has put a smile on my face.