Syndicate Never Stood a Chance

[ksn0va]

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]

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]

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-]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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

 

[teh_Canape]

of course people's expectations ruined it
you know, they expected a good game

 

[teh_Canape]

of course people's expectations ruined it
you know, they expected a good game

ba dum tsh!

I enjoyed the game all the way up till the final act where it went really crappy

I attempted to enjoy it, but it really was a tedium to play most of the time

 

[teh_Canape]

of course people's expectations ruined it
you know, they expected a good game

ba dum tsh!

I enjoyed the game all the way up till the final act where it went really crappy

I attempted to enjoy it, but it really was a tedium to play most of the time

Might I ask what you thought of the third act? How did you feel about the sudden decision of the agent switching to the freedom fighter side?

never played the original ones enough to get into their lore properly, so I cannot compare
however, by the game itself and what I experienced from the start to that part, the moment he turned freedom fighter I went "of course, because that's never done before"

 

[thepyrethatburns]

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.

Honestly? No.

Like many who played it back in the day, the remake made my eyes roll and, as details of the plot and whatnot came out, they rolled even more. But, when the demo came out, I allowed it an honest chance anyway because I've been wrong and some remakes (Defender for the PS2 as an example) turned out really good.

This is not one of them. It isn't bad but it was so bland that it didn't really inspire any feelings one way or another. There was nothing in the demo that distinguished itself from any other dull grey shooter on the market.

To me, it's less about any butthurt/nostalgia backlash and more about how this game could have been renamed "Baby's first modern grey FPS". There was nothing in the demo that hasn't been done before and nothing that stood out. While that doesn't make it the worst FPS on the market, that also doesn't make it worth even $20 of my money.

 

[Something Amyss]

Starbreeze's CEO doesn't think the Syndicate reboot "could've ever lived up to some people's expectations."

Especially if they expected it to be GOOD.

Yes, I'm sure making it too hard was the problem with the game, not... I don't know making it be nothing like... Syndicate?

"It's too hard" is one of the new brand of excuses everyone uses when the game sucks. Look at Amy.

It's not the broken controls. It's the difficulty.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

You wonder why they didnt just take the whole original game and make it into a FPS game but you played it from street level instead of from above. Even Ghost Recon has four people to control in a city environment so it wouldn't have been that difficult thing to do.

 

[Tiamat666]

It was a cookie cutter FPS that annoyed the only people who appreciated the branding. What did they expect?

I wanted to say something, but then the first post already nailed it for me right there.

 

[Simonoly]

It never stood a chance because it simply wasn't a very good game. The multiplayer was fine, but it wasn't enough to make up for the shockingly bad (and incredibly short) single player.

I had a similar reaction to this game as I did with Kingdoms of Amalur: the game was so generic that I felt like I was just playing an expansion pack of a game I had already played before.

Is it that difficult to try and create something original?

 

[Lt._nefarious]

It was a damn shame that game wasn't successful, I thought it was awesome... yep a damn, damn shame.

 

[Quellist]

[

Well back in the day it was to me the most awesome thing ever (even though i usually prefer TBS to RTS), and while its possible to finish the game just sniping and mind controlling what made it so good back in the day was you had so much freedom about completing your objective. It might not stand up so well next to modern RTS but what you have to understand is for its time it was pretty sweet and i think what i and many other fans were hoping for when we heard the word 'Reboot' was an RTS faithful to the spirit of the game with modern day production values and refinements. What we got was something a lot different.

I dont like FPS a lot anyway but seeing a cherished franchise reborn in such a way feels like a double blow. I think the way this game was made basically guaranteed it would piss off the original fanbase.

*Edit* I think part of your problem is the strategy guide. I remember playing that game without a strategy guide and formulating my own strategies. These days that seems to be out of fashion. Yes with a good strategy guide you can walk every mission but you lose the exploration of gameplay angle

Tbh the huge thing I couldn't deal with was a silly thing, I'm very defensive minded and when you couldn't stop time passing at any point, not even with the upgrades! it shifted me out of my comfort zone, I could see some of the reasons why people liked it. Although I wasn't yet looking at the strategy guide for actual guidance and more I was just trying to figure out how the controls worked and the dude had a summary at the front which I ended up flicking through.

I didn't really mean to be critical of it as it was per say, but I just feel that you could have kept was the core fun of the game and completely ditch the control scheme, which I don't know would have been so acceptable nowadays. I was thinking it should control like an FPS (although to be honest a third-person shooter would have made much more sense) but the level design and key gameplay shouldn't have been FPS level design. Instead you have a wide range of upgraded abilities that offer flexible approaches (Human Revolution sort of thing as opposed to Mind Hacking) and been put in, say a fully mapped out building, with an objective. I hope that would be exploratory and flexible and very different to the games you get nowadays without the hangbacks of old control systems. Would that have been okay?

I cant argue i would have thoroughly enjoyed a game like you described, maybe it wouldn't have been a totally faithful remake but it would have been faithful to the spirit of the game and IMO that's more important. Also it sounds like it would be fun that way....shame developers wont take a risk and be creative...

 

[Atrocious Joystick]

It didn't tank because it wasn't like the original Syndicate. That's just a masturbatory fantasies of the fans and a convenient excuse for the developers.

It tanked because it wasn't that impressive of a game, the most impressive thing about it was the trailer. If it had been a good game, the fans could cry all they want and they would still have raked in a bunch of cash and a rebooted franchise to play around with. Fallout 3 raked in the cash like it was nudie pictures of Obama. And it "betrayed" the original franchise too.

So did WOW for that matter. And Neverwinter Nights. (The "first" one)