Syndicate Never Stood a Chance

AgentCooper

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I actually enjoyed Syndicate and want to replay the game someday in the future. I paid half price for it during an Amazon sell and went into it not knowing a thing.


I can understand why people felt "betrayed" and I get it. I see it as selling out and leaving fans of the series for dead. Especially pandering to the other side of the genre spectrum.
 

Shadowstar38

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I dont think the problem is a liscense was turned into another genre. No one was upset when they made Halo: Wars.

Its that the game itself couldnt stand on its own. There were some problems with the games that made it bad from FPS standards but the fact that its not not its predesessors doesnt make it automatically bad.
 

AgentCooper

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Shadowstar38 said:
I dont think the problem is a liscense was turned into another genre. No one was upset when they made Halo: Wars.

Its that the game itself couldnt stand on its own. There were some problems with the games that made it bad from FPS standards but the fact that its not not its predesessors doesnt make it automatically bad.
I remember the only people who felt upset were the folks on the Bungie forum. It was more of they don't care attitude then anything.
 

lapan

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Grey Carter said:
FPS reboot
There we have the problem. Those who liked the original won't like the genre change and those who didn't know it won't care about the title. Same is true for the X-com FPS reboot, but at least Xcom will get a genuine reboot as well.
 

GasparNolasco

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It failed for obvious reasons. I'll be the 100.000th person to say the fans of the branding hate it for being a generic FPS and the fans of generic FPSs are playing Call of Duty.

But it's good that developers learn that you can't just slap an old franchise's name in an FPS and call it a reboot, spiritual sequel or whatever and expect magical gains, you have to put some effort in it. "Gamers" can be very dumb consumers, but (thank the gods) they are not THAT dumb!
 

JesterRaiin

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"I don't think we could've ever lived up to some people's expectations."
Here's a handkerchief, now go away. :|

I think that Syndicate's reboot failed because it featured too many unnecessary things. For example it's beyond me why UI features all this informations about items i can't use.
Cut the crap, make more intuitive and less scripted maps for Syndicate 2 = profit.
 

ThatDarnCoyote

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Shadowstar38 said:
I dont think the problem is a liscense was turned into another genre. No one was upset when they made Halo: Wars.

Its that the game itself couldnt stand on its own. There were some problems with the games that made it bad from FPS standards but the fact that its not not its predesessors doesnt make it automatically bad.
Agreed on your first point, although I liked the new Syndicate more than it seems you did.

I know I'm in a serious minority here - I played and loved the original Syndicate back when it came out, and I thought the new FPS was pretty good.

Other than using the same title, this wasn't much of a "reboot". It didn't re-tell the story of the original Syndicate, because the original Syndicate didn't have a story, it had a setting. This was just a different game that took place in the same universe.

Sure it had its flaws - the story was such that anyone who's seen a movie in the last fifteen years could predict its every turn, and they sure did overdo the bloom. But it had some nice scenery and set-piece fights, the breach abilities were fun, the voice acting and music was good, and it fleshed out the world of its setting in ways that the original really couldn't.
 

Kimarous

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All I can say is... at least XCOM got a clue and didn't put all their eggs in one basket.

That's all that really needs to be said, really. Anything else would be redundancy.
 

ksn0va

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Such a waste. I liked Syndicate more than most, I thought it was great though I agree why people didn't like it as much. If only they chose to release it as a brand new IP, things would of been different.
 

VoidWanderer

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I just had a random thought/observation.

If this game wasn't 'based on Syndicate', but say another Deus Ex game, would that make it more enjoyable?

To me, Syndicate is all about strategy and positioning, from what I have seen this game offers very little in regards to this aspect. But say a Deus Ex game which is already FPS, would the game be 'better' if say the story was about getting a new mod or something.
 

VoidWanderer

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Credossuck said:
proving once more that the industry is simply stupid.
It's not that the Industry is stupid, the investors are stupidly greedy.

We want money is their mindset.

We want to make MORE money by making sure the game is good SHOULD be their mindset.
 

-Dragmire-

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I get the feeling that if the game was named something different and was advertised as a spiritual successor to Syndicate, merely set in the same universe, then people wouldn't be so vocal... or at least to a lesser degree.


The way I see it, it's like he announced a sequel to Chess and all the fans of Chess were eagerly awaiting an updated version of the game they enjoyed playing and when he released the game, it turned out to be a tic-tac-toe with the brand name Chess on it(tic-tac-toe being all the craze these days resulting in an already over saturated market). The fans of Chess have seen enough tic-tac-toe year after year, they just wanted a shiny new Chess set with possibly some minor gameplay tweeks so it felt new but nostalgic.

All stupidity aside, I think the dev had an idea for a game that he couldn't sell as a new ip, so he got one from the publisher to slap on his idea so it would be green lit. He may have been inspired by the original Syndicate but he obviously wasn't too big a fan of the gameplay(granted maybe the publisher thought the original Syndicate's gameplay was too great a risk in the current market and forced the dev to comply with current gaming trends).
 

Giftmacher

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And so it came to pass that banging a round peg into a square hole met with mixed success.

In all honesty, I do love an FPS but the market is saturated and is liable to remain so because big publishers have a serious lack of imagination. It seems to me that if you want something interesting these days then you have to look to indie devs. Sure there's plenty of mediocre/unexciting games there too but the ratio of interesting to unadventurous games is a lot higher.

When will the likes of EA cotton on and support a bit of innovation rather than serving us the usual gruel?
 

Thaluikhain

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teebeeohh said:
thaluikhain said:
Eh?

Turning Warcraft from RTS to RPG seems to have worked, because people liked the world. I don't see why a Syndicate FPS is necessarily a bad thing.
completely different thing. warcraft was turned by the same studio and they put half a decade of development time into it. they didn't take a popular name and tried to make a quick buck of the popularity, they invested a lot of time and money into developing their own franchise in a way that could easily have failed.
it's also blizzard and back then they were basically god. then they were bought by activision
That's fair enough, but that's not usually what's given as the reason they failed, it's generally said that changing the game type was what ruined it.
 

Elijah Newton

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I'm going to play my 'I called it' card, back with the announcement trailer came out :

Elijah Newton said:
munkyforce said:
Wow can't believe how disappointed I am by this trailer. The original was one of my all time favourite games. Turning it into what looks like a fps that rips off Deus Ex... I'll reserve judgment, maybe it will at least capture the feel of the original game world.
Preach it, bruddah. A reboot which reminds people of something other than that franchise pretty much has 'FAIL' writ large upon it.

First Xcom and now Syndicate. What's with buying the IP for turn based strategy games and then repacking them as much more generic first person shooters? Isn't that like saying, "You know what I like? Chess. Let's make a chess game. Only you play it with cards! And more than one opponent. And simplify the rules, simplify them a lot. Oh yeah, let's totally take chess - only make it blackjack."

When I heard Syndicate was coming back I thought - and call me crazy - that it would have been relaunched as a real time strategy game. Not a huge battle, Starcraft kind of thing, but something with smaller numbers of more personalized units in a more intricate setting. I was excited.

This, though? Meh. Very, very meh.
The Xcom FPS still has me shaking my head. Like with Syndicate, I'd love to be proved wrong, but I just don't see it happening. At least Fireaxis's XCOM: Enemy Unknown is poised to reboot without jumping genres. And hey! I could be wrong about that, too, but of the two it's definitely the game I think is going to pay off.

Oh! And for those who wanted to play a Syndicate-esque game which was 'smaller numbers of more personalized units in a more intricate setting,' consider playing Frozen Synapse. It lacks the customization of individual units, which is a pity, but the interface is clean, the gameplay is tight and the price is cheap. I've been enjoying it.
 

Elijah Newton

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I think in fairness I should also say that, yes, a big part of the reason I didn't like it was that it called itself Syndicate, which for me created certain gameplay expectations. I think that if they had opted not to do this I would have regarded it more favorably as a generic FPS with a few interesting mechanics and a better-than-average look and feel.

I played the demo and there were several genuinely enjoyable moments based around the emphasis on cooperation and the relative toughness of opponents. I thought some of the ideas, like the ubiquitious hacking, had a lot of promise. I'm not saying I would've necessarily bought the game if it hadn't called itself 'Syndicate,' but I would've been impressed enough with a new IP to keep an eye out for a sequel which might've refined the good ideas and eliminated some of the more meh generic stuff.
 

BrotherRool

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gideonkain said:
Syndicate suffered the same fate as Shadowrun. It used a brand that has a voracious and exacting fan base and didn't stay true to what made the source material so popular in the first place.

Syndicate (the Original) was a tactical game about squad management, Syndicate (the reboot?) was basically a good cooperative game in the vein of Borderlands using aesthetics that have been (unfairly or not) associated with Deus Ex: HR.

As another example, look at the two upcoming X-Com games - an FPS in production that has already been panned by fans and a reboot of the original game design that was announced some time after but has already garnered a great deal more excitement.

When you attempt to utilize a brand, you better make sure that your product lives up to the expectations of the fans that made the original product popular enough in the first place to have the sequel/reboot even get the "green light".
XCom being panned by fans at this moment doesn't mean much. Fallout 3 and Deus Ex:HR were both panned by fans and turned out to be great and loved by most, and I'm hoping Max Payne will go the same way.

Basically fans are going to hate most things unless you're very lucky. It's hard to mesh interests because the opinion of a fan is created at the time the game is released and it can be hard to realise that with the flaws that would appear if the game was released today. In the end I'm glad Fallout and DX:HR did their own things despite fan expectation but you've got to do it with reason and recognise the core concepts which Syndicate didn't do. I think you hit it on the head when above all else, it was the tactical aspect they needed to keep and they didn't do that.

Maybe the XCOM people are geniuses. If fans are going to react badly to almost any workable reboot maybe the correct way to do it is to announce a fake project which is much much worse in terms of change than what you plan and then quickly say 'oh okay we'll do it like you want to then' and make the game you wanted to in the first place :D