"Snooty" Shooter Critics Anger Rage Dev

[James Joseph Emerald]

It's fine with me, as long as those people don't decide that their opinions are somehow more valid than tens of millions of other people.

Note that I'm not saying you're in a minority and therefore don't matter. In fact, there's probably more people who hate Twilight, Transformers and COD than there are people who like them. I'm just saying, declaring something "bad" based on the prevailing opinion of your circle of friends is very narrow-minded. They have to be doing something right to attract such a massive audience. I don't believe in the "everyone is just too stupid to know better" argument.

Uh... no, I'm "declaring these things are bad" because I experienced them first-hand and noticed that they were bad. Other peoples' opinions have no bearing on the issue. I think the same thing about Lars Von Trier, for instance.

EDIT: And really, why get mad about people judging things based on the opinions of people they trust? I can eat an entire shit sandwich and decide it's a bad sandwich, take a bite of a shit sandwich, put it down, and decide it's a bad sandwich, or hear my friend's opinion on a shit sandwich and decide I trust his opinion that it's a bad sandwich. Those are all valid reasons to decide shit sandwiches are unattractive as food options, and they're valid no matter how many people swear by shit sandwiches.

Like I said, your opinion is yours, and however you form it is fine with me. What I'm taking issue with is the fact that you seem to think that your opinion is universally "correct" (especially when reinforced by other like-minded friends/people on the Escapist, which is what I meant by the "circle of friends" comment).

My only point is that, like Carmack was saying, certain high-minded types tend to have a bias against popular games like Call of Duty. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that you would compare it to a shit sandwich. If you actually look at it objectively, suspending all prejudicial bias, I think you'd find a substantial amount of positive elements. And I think that if say, Deus Ex was an extremely popular, over-hyped game and Call of Duty or Halo was fairly obscure, there would be a tendency to have the exact opposite opinion about those games.

 

[stewox]

Mr Carmack, that only valids for console kids and casual mainstreams who have no idea what good games are.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Like I said, your opinion is yours, and however you form it is fine with me. What I'm taking issue with is the fact that you seem to think that your opinion is universally "correct" (especially when reinforced by other like-minded friends/people on the Escapist, which is what I meant by the "circle of friends" comment).

My only point is that, like Carmack was saying, certain high-minded types tend to have a bias against popular games like Call of Duty. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that you would compare it to a shit sandwich. If you actually look at it objectively, suspending all prejudicial bias, I think you'd find a substantial amount of positive elements. And I think that if say, Deus Ex was an extremely popular, over-hyped game and Call of Duty or Halo was fairly obscure, there would be a tendency to have the exact opposite opinion about those games.

No, I'm comparing CoD to a shit sandwich because I played it for a couple of years, and am comparing my CoD experience with my experience playing stuff like Halo, TF2, and Bad Company 2. And continuing with our sandwich metaphor, I don't care how tasty the bread and mayonnaise is if the core of the sandwich is this:

So in other words, the assumption that people (for instance) hate on CoD/Twilight because there's some sort of elitist conspiracy against popular stuff is kind of silly when the simpler explanation is that they played/read CoD/Twilight and didn't like it, or someone whose opinion they trust played/read Cod/Twilight and didn't like it.

 

[Jumplion]

You really have no fucking clue what you're talking about, do you?

Yes, because insulting me and just pushing aside whatever I said is grounds for a good debate. I'm so glad we could stay civil in this, really I am.

Do you have any fucking idea how old following a trend is for videogames? Does the term "Street Fighter Clone" (approximately 229 of them) mean anything to you? How about "Sonic Clone" (approximately 125)? How about "GTA clone" (75 of them)? "Light Force Clone" (112)? Pong Clones (39?)

....and? Your point? It just seems to me, and for some others, that this trend is prevalent in the FPS genre.

Do you know what the difference is between those trends and modern ones? FUCKING NOTHING. Oh, wait, there is one thing. MODERN FPS'S AREN'T ALL COMPLETELY AWFUL.

Here's a shocker; I never said that. Infact, I specifically remember saying "They may very well all be great games, more power to them if they are, but that doesn't really help the fact that we are just heavy in FPS saturation."

David WOng doesn't have a fucking clue what he's talking about. And before you go posting that link, neither does Moviebob.

Good, 'cause I don't really care about Moviebob in the slightest nor do I know what episode you're referring to.

You don't seem to understand that I really don't want to be thinking what I am thinking right now mainly because, to an extent, I just want fun games. But it's just not enough (for me, personally, anyways) to just be "fun".

So 100's of manhours is now "no effort".

100s of manhours are spent on "Dora The Exploerer: The Video Game", does that mean we should give it a pass despite it being a load of rotten carps? You should be asking them why they spend 100s of manhours on a CoD clone that barely pushes past the 1 million mark.

And then we get to "Why are they working those 100s of man hours?" with crunch time and the like, but that's a different can o' worms.

Oh, I see, you live in a dimension where games like Shadow of the Damned, Alice: Madness Returns, inFamous 2, LittleBigPlanet 2, Portal 2, LA Noire, and so on and so forth: all of these games never came out.

Wat. I really don't know how you came to that conclusion, most every single one of those brings something to the table in some form or another, or expand on it. A little extra sprinkles of some more ingenuity, and a dash of more games taking some extra risks, and I think we'd be better for it.

 

[Treblaine]

Though I'd agree the first person perspective does come with a lot of nagative connotations as in:

"they yook my favourite franchise and turned it into a god damn FPS"

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

As examples of great and held to almost elite status FPS games.

I am really looking forward to RAGE, I like the increased RPG elements yet a high emphasis on good combat it seems to be in a similar vein to Deus Ex or Bioshock, I like that FPS/RPG fusion.

 

[Jumplion]

So you're complaining that a immutable constant of gaming that has been around forever and will be around forever for incredibly obvious reasons is around.

I don't recall a point in time where the industry had a flood of "Sonic the Hedgehog clones" dominate the market. I'm not even talking about copying to begin with, it's the over-saturation I'm annoyed with.

 

[Etab]

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."

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

Tho Im not sure about Deus Ex, Im pretty sure Elder Scrolls is not a shooter...
But if you mean that it's a game that many others have copied after and enjoyed relative success, then that is definitely true.

 

[Treblaine]

Like I said, your opinion is yours, and however you form it is fine with me. What I'm taking issue with is the fact that you seem to think that your opinion is universally "correct" (especially when reinforced by other like-minded friends/people on the Escapist, which is what I meant by the "circle of friends" comment).

My only point is that, like Carmack was saying, certain high-minded types tend to have a bias against popular games like Call of Duty. And I think that's evidenced by the fact that you would compare it to a shit sandwich. If you actually look at it objectively, suspending all prejudicial bias, I think you'd find a substantial amount of positive elements. And I think that if say, Deus Ex was an extremely popular, over-hyped game and Call of Duty or Halo was fairly obscure, there would be a tendency to have the exact opposite opinion about those games.

No, I'm comparing CoD to a shit sandwich because I played it for a couple of years, and am comparing my CoD experience with my experience playing stuff like Halo, TF2, and Bad Company 2. And continuing with our sandwich metaphor, I don't care how tasty the bread and mayonnaise is if the core of the sandwich is this:

So in other words, the assumption that people (for instance) hate on CoD/Twilight because there's some sort of elitist conspiracy against popular stuff is kind of silly when the simpler explanation is that they played/read CoD/Twilight and didn't like it, or someone whose opinion they trust played/read Cod/Twilight and didn't like it.

Best argument: Inception

Really good film, really weird and complex yet sold really well. People don't JUST hate things because they are successful.

It's just things don't have the be the best in the world to sell more than anyone else, it just has to get the essentials right like marketing, conversion rates and so on. That just means popularity alone can't give anything a free ride.

In other words if can sell well because it is good, or simply more marketable.

 

[Treblaine]

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."

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

Tho Im not sure about Deus Ex, Im pretty sure Elder Scrolls is not a shooter...
But if you mean that it's a game that many others have copied after and enjoyed relative success, then that is definitely true.

Ah, you shoot arrows? You shoot fireballs?

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".

 

[Sightless Wisdom]

The reason we always want to see innovation is because doing the same thing over and over again gets boring. I can't speak for everyone else in the country, but I really don't find CoD multiplayer interesting. Similarly, I don't enjoy any of the other shooters that look and feel similar, like Battlefield. Now It's not that I don't enjoy them because lots of other people do, it's because I played one of them, I got tired of it, and then they released another one that felt like the same game. At that point I gave up. On the opposite side of that, I do enjoy the Halo franchise. It's also popular, a few years ago it was the most popular FPS franchise around. The thing is, from Halo CE to Halo 2 they changed the engine and added new mechanics. From Halo 2 to 3 they changed the engine again and modified old mechanics and added new ones. Then there was ODST and Reach. They were games with and entirely different feel. Not to mention the fact that all of the Halo games had their own story lines that continued the tale of Master Chief or the Happenings around him, which felt like new content.

All this to say, popularity certainly isn't the issue. However, claiming that innovation isn't necessary, and that making a game with the same formula over and over again is a good idea for a developer... that's not going to get the industry anywhere. The people who make really fun games and really move things forward are the people who try new things. You have to remember that back when Carmack was getting into the FPS industry... there wasn't an FPS industry. He was one of the people doing something that hadn't been done(much) before.

 

[Dragon_Nexus]

"and that while he was happy that Rage was different from the other shooters on the market"

Really? Cos...I've seen a few trailers for Rage and...well I couldn't see anything in there that I didn't almost immediately identify from another game. Particularlt Fallout 3, Bioshock and Borderlands.

 

[Dragon_Nexus]

There is not one shooter that isn't just a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiast. I don't see what's "snooty" about not wanting someone to sell his gonorrhea to stupid people, and then doing the exact same thing the next year. Maybe isntead of gonorrhea, he could sell soap.

What about Mass Effect? Or Fallout? Or Metro?
There are plenty of shooters that aren't just military gun wank.

 

[crystalsnow]

I was going to post something here, but after looking at some of the replies this thread has on it, I'm just going to put the following:

[Insert trolling here]

 

[bob1052]

Carmacks argument here is that CoD is popular and therefore good.

You are so wrong.

Carmack's argument here is that CoD is popular and therefore people enjoy it.

Not really, he never says that bad games should get a free pass. What's he's sick of is people dismissing shooters just because they're shooters.

I draw your attention to the following:

"That's still a proven formula that people like, and it's a mistake to [discount that]. As long as people are buying it, it means they're enjoying it," he said. "If they buy the next Call of Duty, it's because they loved the last one and they want more of it."

Replace Call of Duty with Transformers in that quote.

He doesn't use the word good once in that quote. You are trying to define his argument as something it isn't so that you can attack the falsified argument you have attributed to him.

Oh and

I didn't condemn anyone. I said Carmack was an idiot.

Stop being an idiot.

 

[Dfskelleton]

I guess I can agree with that. However, I don't see many people dissing shooters just because they're shooters. Well, I guess if someone were to notice, it'd be one of the founders of the genre.
Also, how the hell do you interpret "popularity isn't a bad thing" as "innovation is a bad thing"? How do you do that? You'd have to have pretentiousness seeping from your pores to think that.

 

[Jumplion]

So you're complaining that a immutable constant of gaming that has been around forever and will be around forever for incredibly obvious reasons is around.

I don't recall a point in time where the industry had a flood of "Sonic the Hedgehog clones" dominate the market. I'm not even talking about copying to begin with, it's the over-saturation I'm annoyed with.

You weren't a gamer in the mid 90's, were you? Busby, Bryan the Lion, Mr. Nutz, Aero the Acrobat, Awesome Possum, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrle, Zool, Ristar, Plok, Chester Cheetah, Cool Spot - do you want me to keep going, or are you getting the picture yet?

Those mid 90s ripoffs were just that; in the mid 90s. The FPS dominance has been here for practically 2 decades.

 

[]DustArma[]

There is not one shooter that isn't just a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiast. I don't see what's "snooty" about not wanting someone to sell his gonorrhea to stupid people, and then doing the exact same thing the next year. Maybe isntead of gonorrhea, he could sell soap.

Oh LOOK, if it isn't Snooty McSnoot, Carmack was talking about you now, wasn't him.

I'm not even going to bother to point out what's wrong with your argument (everything), I'll just let the mods do their job.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

My problem with this is that he seems to be acting under the idea that not only does popular = good, but unpopular, or indie = bad. I'm sorry, was Super Meat Boy not one of the best games of 2010? Is Minecraft not the most succesful PC game of the year? Does not innovation and creativity pay off when coupled with good marketing and word-of-mouth? No, I guess that popular and bland is as good as moderately successful and amazing. Nice to see you're reaching for the stars there, Mr. Carmack.

Oh, excuse me Mr. Carmack. I had not realized my behavior was unbecoming, I merely believed that I was one of the millions filling your paychecks and therefore had the ground to criticize your products when they didn't meet my expectations.

Don't worry, I won't make that mistake again.

You're the only one who's made sense so far, amen.

DustArma[]

There is not one shooter that isn't just a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiast. I don't see what's "snooty" about not wanting someone to sell his gonorrhea to stupid people, and then doing the exact same thing the next year. Maybe isntead of gonorrhea, he could sell soap.

Oh LOOK, if it isn't Snooty McSnoot, Carmack was talking about you now, wasn't him.

I'm not even going to bother to point out what's wrong with your argument (everything), I'll just let the mods do their job.

He's not being snooty, he's being vindictive and mean. Call me crazy, but I'm almost 100% certain there's room in this world for "arty" games and dumb fun action games? Unless we're talking about playing the market, in which case, I have little to no opinion that Zero Punctuation hasn't already summed up for me.

Meanwhile, anyone calling every shooter "juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychopathic rape-enthusiasts" is probably the kind of person who either hasn't played Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex, witnessing the sort of deep and interpersonal story that can be told from a first-person perspective, or someone who has only ever played Duke Nukem, a juvenile murder fantasy from the mind of psychotic rape-enthusiasts. Oh wait.

 

[ZeppMan217]

Come on, you are not serious. Are you really gonna listen a man who said that story in games is like story in porn movies? Carmack might be a good, even great, coder etc. but he doesn't know shit outside his vacuum sphere.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

It's not popularity that's the problem, but just cranking out the same game. Even if it's still good, some innovation will always make something that much better.