Ah, you shoot arrows? You shoot fireballs?Etab said:When another game developer tries to cash in on the success of a game that isn't theirs, people start to wonder where the creative genius has gone from those that no longer want to defend their own innovations as unique, and start admitting;
"yes, we are aiming to provide something similar to what makes this other popular title popular."
Carmack should be staunchly defending why his games are different from a rival's successful product. How they are instead similar to his own previous successes, etc etc.
No doubt he's been backed into a corner by some journalistic pressure and said something that was later thrown in false light by whatever media has reproduced his words.
I can't think of a better example of the repurcussions of making a game similar to COD than Crysis 2 was, in a multiplayer aspect at least.
Everyone started saying, "oh this is just a COD clone, why play this when I can play the real thing?"
And all you get as a developer is the public comparing your game to the other, and more often than not people coming up with things where your game fell short of the other, rather than focusing on what makes your game unique. You just heard a lot of "it's just COD with a nanosuit", rather than "this shooter runs great with this nanosuit mechanic."
Crysis 1 may have been similar to Halo with the nanosuit, but you clearly only had people comparing the whole 'suit' aspect, as opposed to calling crysis1 "halo in the jungle".
But no doubt Carmack here is just having a whinge about the most pretentious of critics who might abuse him for not being willing to take a total diversion from usual shooter and create a full innovation on the shooter, at the high risk of flopping totally.
He's probably just trying to say "I do what I'm good at and that should be popular because people like what I'm good at, and that's been popular before so why should I change?"
But as they say in the media, "If you've opened your mouth you've already said too much."
Tho Im not sure about Deus Ex, Im pretty sure Elder Scrolls is not a shooter...Treblaine said:But I think the industry including critics are enlightened enough to know that First Psrson Shooters/something can be great:
-Half Life 2
-Bioshock
-Elder Scrolls
-Fallout 3+
-Deus Ex
-Portal
-Metroid Prime
But if you mean that it's a game that many others have copied after and enjoyed relative success, then that is definitely true.
The title "FPS" isn't perfect but it has come to define a genre far wider than the literal meaning of the acronym. Like how you can have a "slasher film" even if the serial killer has a weapon with zero slashing ability, the important thing is you have a serial killer picking of the cast one by one, not the semantics of the tools used.
The essential thing is the immersion of the first person perspective, one of the initial key benefits is how it simplified aiming as you looked down the light of sight of the projectiles. But I think most significant now is the immersion factor, how literally looking through the eyes of the in game protagonist (often without breaking that perspective) how powerful that game be for gameplay storytelling.
I'd - with some hesitation - call Amnesia: Dark Ascent and FPS game even though there is zero shooting at all. I'd never call it a "First Person Shooter", I'd use the acronym "FPS" with the "S" could stand for something other than "shooter". Like "First Person Scarer" or "First Person Searcher".