Aiddon said:
I have no experience with the Thief, so it's difficult for me to build expectations. If they make it essentially like Dishonored then I'm all for it. Hopefully they don't piss too many fans of though; convincing fans is fine, just don't antagonize them or say their criticisms are wrong.
Werewolfkid said:
Thief will be a good game, maybe even a great game, a masterpiece even. I just want us to stop being so cynical about the future and instead look at it with cautious optimism, instead of letting some guy's comment of wanting fans to like the new game convince us that the new game is already dead on arrival.
No, Aiddon, that is the one thing that they, and their fanboys, will not do. You can see that here. Ironically enough, defenders of this sort of thing will project all of their negativity onto people they're claiming are being negative.
Again, the key problem here is that the company is lying. If the company is going to make a triple-A fps clusterfuck that handles like a fat, diseased buffalo and offers nothing but photorealistic gore with no plot, challenge, or engrossing theme, then they can totally do that.
But if they did that, and advertised it honestly,
it would not sell.
That's the dirty secret. That's the Big Lie behind raping franchises, attacking used games, encouraging contempt for old-school fans, and on and on.
The industry is geared to create triple-A games. If a triple-A company can make better money by NOT doing this, it will, instead, do it anyway,
and lie about it.
Why? Consider the cost of not doing so. You'd have to make deeper, richer games that meet consumer expectation. This would require a change in the nature of management.
Management doesn't make sacrifices for you. You make sacrifices for management.
Why should managers embrace the Real World? Why not live in a fantasy where they can pretend they can capture the CoD audience and the WoW audience and the GTA audience and every other acronym floating through their dreams? If they're wrong, they'll just blame the devs, fire them, and hire more. Why should they ever evaluate their strategies?
Most people here watch the Jimquisition.
Why do you think management doesn't? Because they don't have to. Corporate America has its head up its own ass.
But that dog won't hunt. They make insipid triple-A garbage and they lose their core audience -- and fail to get much of a new audience as well. So what do you do?
Simple. You lie. You lie your ass off. You tell the customers that they'll get what they want. When the grassroots groundswell says "no, we won't get what we want, you're not giving it," you respond by telling them what they want and that it's really just a variation of what they always wanted.
Problem is, this sort of thing breeds contempt. And passive-aggressiveness. And we're all sick of it. Worse, trolls come out and criticize the customer for Not Liking What I Like, dishonestly claiming that a customer who has been mislead by a publisher is to blame for that publisher's bad products.
So it's not the bad games. If Thief -- seriously, if you can't come up with a title, you should not be making games -- if Thief is terrible, that's a pointless tragedy. . . but the market will deal with that fairly by making its sales low. The problem is the hype around it will be noxious misinformation, as usual, and when customers complain about that and reject the game, there will be a social backlash against them.
Devs can feel free to make whatever game they like -- e.g., whatever game the publisher demands they make. But be honest about it. If you're making a Dishonored clone that has so little to do with Thief that it doesn't even count as being in the same genre, that's fine -- so long as you don't obfuscate. Don't piss on my leg and call it rain.
