Brother, that's a pretty profound start to the week. Nice going.GonzoGamer said:I think a lot of the pretentiousness we see in games (especially "story driven" games) is also thanks to this social desirability bias. I think many people want to sound like the kind of person who wants to play a slow moving "story driven" game like Heavy Rain because then people might think they're not the kind of gamer that goes onto CoD shouting slurs.
It's probably the same reason everyone thinks all guys want a skinny girl with long hair and big boobs. I know for a fact that there are a lot of guys who try really hard to get that kind of girl just because they want to seem like an alpha male. I find that's it's the most obnoxiously vocal ones that are the ones trying to convince everyone....
Yeah, you have a point there. From what I understand both Half Life and Halo were very different games during the iniial stages of their production. We may have ended up with far inferior games had the respective developers not decided to change things for the better.ravenshrike said:Except it WORKED for them. You'll note he said nothing about how much publisher interference was involved in the games in question. Somehow I doubt focus groups and publisher demands were responsible for any major changes in AGWAS/R&C. Whereas you can be damned sure they were responsible for the major changes in Overstrike/Fuse.
In short, Insomniac themselves orchestrated the changes to the game, it was not a product of publisher pressure. The most baffling part of the whole thing is that Overstrike, a fun, stylised and colourful 4 player shooter, turned into Fuse, a grey, gritty, cover based shooter, because they thought the guns weren't "fun" enough. Why would you change the tone of the game so dramatically when your guns were the problem? Surely the OTT nature of Overstrike gave far more opportunity for fun guns and silly gameplay.Ted Price said:At the time, when we showed Overstrike in 2011, we weren't where we needed to be with the weapons. We had some cool concepts on paper and in the video, but ultimately, when we started playing the game, the weapons lacked heft, they lacked impact, and they lacked that fun factor that we believe is at the core of every one of our games.
I mean the habit of making something relatively mundane and trying too hard to make it seem like its so much more important. Like in the aforementioned Heavy Rain you have to sit and watch your character's kid eat dinner and do his homework. Doing these things with your real life kid is important when you're doing it but I would never make someone else watch and doing this with a game npc you've just met is absurdly tedious.Darth_Payn said:Hmm, I didn't think of that before. What do you mean when you say "pretentious"? I get the feeling it means that the game's story is calling you the player an awful person, or something like that.GonzoGamer said:I think a lot of the pretentiousness we see in games (especially "story driven" games) is also thanks to this social desirability bias. I think many people want to sound like the kind of person who wants to play a slow moving "story driven" game like Heavy Rain because then people might think they're not the kind of gamer that goes onto CoD shouting slurs.
You should hear me after I've smoked a couple of spliffs.IndianaJonny said:Brother, that's a pretty profound start to the week. Nice going.
He'll have a reason to stop talking about it when it stops being a problem. He kicked off this video with the new Insomniac trailer as evidence that this still is a problem. Also, I don't think he's had an episode completely dedicated to focus groups. He's talked about them a lot, but never gone this in depth.Magog1 said:Jim did you seriously talk about beating a dead horse while bitching and moaning about EA?
Seriously Jim? Your teaching the same lesson with a new spin every week now.
Dear God man Diversify.
Not saying it sucks, not saying it's bad.. it's an awesome lesson... And i like reputation Lord knows i play diablo 3,
But come on man Just a little something else. I swear to God we won't all start magically respecting EA 1 week later if you shelf bitching about them just a little bit.
Pretty please?
Dear god, all my this^^^Entitled said:I think, in a certain sense, the online community circlejerk also has it's own social desirability demands.
What do *you* want from games? "Innovation" seems to be a popular demand, that makes us all sound refined and knowledgeable, but it's one of those cases where the word ounds good on paper, but in practice, most of us would rather play a comfortably familiar genre with nicely fine-tuned mechanics, and slightly curious setting, than something with no familiarity at all.
Personally, I've gone on record as thinking the "innovation" craze and the whole "new IP are necessary" are ridiculous, and I'll keep doing it.Entitled said:On the other hand, the reverse of this is also true, if you imagine online movie geeks as a kind of focus group, that just weren't asked by studios.
The only reason why we tend to imagine "New IP" as the pinnacle of enjoyable entertainment, is because just like with my earlier post's example of "innovation", it's one of those things that we all like to repeat in an echo-chamber as it sounds very sophisticated and intelligent.
Go to a specialized TV show or game or movie fandom, ask people what they want, and they will admit "More of our favorite thing". But ask them all in front of the Escapist forums, and they will all say "New IP", because none of them wants to admit to being That Guy who cares more about a franchise than about the Freshness of the Industry.