Syndicate Remake Revealed as a Shooter - UPDATED

[Cat of Doom]

WOW I remember playing this ages ago on my dads computer, must have been one of my first games. Don't really care if its RTS or FPS, It will be great to return to the world. Plus its co-op, hopefully will be good, I'v been waiting for a good co-op game for a while.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Of course all of this is wild speculation.

Honestly? I think you're giving far too much credit to the buyers. People who have heard of it will buy it and go yeuch. People who haven't will look at the pictures and decide on that.

Names aren't as powerful as people think because with the fans, you also get the fans. (points to Steam forums)

And to be honest, they probably could have made a game similar to the original and made a lot of money from the fans of that game. But I imagine there's more money to be (potentially) made by copying the market leader.

But that's one of EA's main problems - they're always trailing the market instead of making it. Even Ubisoft/Blizzard know that to hold the market, you have to take a risk and cover it's ass. EA seems to be pushing blandy Mcbland and raking in clone fees, rather than pushing the envelope like they used to.

You're never gonna do fast food better than McDonalds or Burger King, but you can do better food and still make a profit. Rather than trading on burger and chips to the people who can't be arsed to get the real stuff.

Call the damn game "Zenith" or "Cybermancer" or "GodNet" and we don't have a problem, because you're not crushing the original's potential sequel. Simply steal the name and you're selling a lie. And a lie that stops the new truth.

Half the defenders here are violently defending how good something's going to be from the screenshots, for Gabe's sake.

If it's a choice between wildly nostalgic dreams, and synthesized nightmares; pull the damn plug on us all now.

 

[b3nn3tt]

Of course all of this is wild speculation.

Honestly? I think you're giving far too much credit to the buyers. People who have heard of it will buy it and go yeuch. People who haven't will look at the pictures and decide on that.

Names aren't as powerful as people think because with the fans, you also get the fans. (points to Steam forums)

And to be honest, they probably could have made a game similar to the original and made a lot of money from the fans of that game. But I imagine there's more money to be (potentially) made by copying the market leader.

But that's one of EA's main problems - they're always trailing the market instead of making it. Even Ubisoft/Blizzard know that to hold the market, you have to take a risk and cover it's ass. EA seems to be pushing blandy Mcbland and raking in clone fees, rather than pushing the envelope like they used to.

You're never gonna do fast food better than McDonalds or Burger King, but you can do better food and still make a profit. Rather than trading on burger and chips to the people who can't be arsed to get the real stuff.

Call the damn game "Zenith" or "Cybermancer" or "GodNet" and we don't have a problem, because you're not crushing the original's potential sequel. Simply steal the name and you're selling a lie. And a lie that stops the new truth.

Half the defenders here are violently defending how good something's going to be from the screenshots, for Gabe's sake.

If it's a choice between wildly nostalgic dreams, and synthesized nightmares; pull the damn plug on us all now.

I don't really know. I mean, I never played the original, and all I've heard of this game is pretty much this article.

At the end of the day, a lot of people complaining will still buy it anyway to see how much it changed, and new buyers will buy it based, as you said, on the box and whatever marketing they hear.

Also, if fans of the original don't like the look of thiis enw game, nobody is forcing them to buy it. If they loved the original that much, and hate the new one so much, simply don't buy it.

 

[Thyunda]

Okay, now I'm usually the last to leap up and shout "O NOES FPS ARE BAD!!!!!" but even I'm getting a little weary of this. Now I don't know the original Syndicate - however this top-down squad game I just read about in the above article sounds like fun....mentally challenging, but fun. First person shooters are never mentally challenging. They just occasionally have a pattern it takes a minute to figure out, but then it becomes another going-through-the-motions.

Why would you take a squad game and make it into another FPS? And a story about 'corruption and revenge'? Can we not have a morally ambiguous game? Please? Just once? Like, y'know, the protagonist is going for revenge against an action that was not actually committed by the Big Bad for the sake of being bad...perhaps an emotional struggle wouldn't go amiss?

But nope. We get "You're morally pure, they're not. Shoot them in the face." What absolute bollocks.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Tell you what, I'll give your desires thought if you can name me more than three modern squad-based, tactical RTS games for consoles that actually sold well and got critical acclaim. I'll even give you the first two for free: Halo Wars and Dragon Age.

I cared about this point until you said "Consoles".
And right there the point became clear. More on this later.

If you nix "real time" from strategy and tactics, you can easily make these sorts of games on consoles. Hell, the original XCOM games used Time-Units and turns, but I suppose the assumption now is that your stereotypical fratwad Xbox 360 gamer wouldn't play it...

Really, play the first two games again and tell me they work well anymore. I'm even a fan of the series, and I can admit that they did NOT age well. Putting HD textures on them and calling it a next gen title won't help that.

Deus Ex proved that you can take an older design and bring it up to modern standards without sacrificing the entire genre. Before you say "Well, Deus Ex 1 was also a shooter.." you will find that it doesn't play AT ALL like most shooters; today or then.

I get what you want... but you don't reboot a franchise by putting a new coat of paint on a 16 year old game and slapping it on Steam, bypassing consoles completely.

This is part of where the ire comes from.
They dredge up old PC-games/IP and then they truncheon them over the head with the Console-marketing-stick until they no longer contain anything but REFERENCES to the elements that made them successful in the first place. The results in the franchise ceasing to retain its mechanical identity and thus it gets turned into generic mediocre garbage.

What this tells me: The IP is just there to sucker players of the older Syndicate games into buying their new shooter. Exactly like XCOM.

It slays me that we live in an age where BOTH MODERN CONSOLES (no, not the Wii. That's last-gen tech.) have access to USB Mouse and Keyboard, yet nobody is even trying to develop strategy games for them.
(And this is the same market demographic who paid 100 bucks for Steel Battalion's controller?)

And it's all because of an "image problem" that many perpetuate but few are willing to defy or change.

"Nobody will buy tactics games on console because the developer assumes that their audience assumes that they will suck. Their audience assumes they will suck because nobody develops them."

It's a Mobius Loop of assumptions. I'd wager that if consoles started making small unit tactics games the genre could grow, and we'd have more solutions for the controller problem.


Until then, we're stuck in this console-only shit-cycle where older properties keep getting rebooted and "reinvented" for the maximum exploitation of nostalgia at the minimum of design effort.
Distinction has become the new "niche", and in today's gaming industry, "niche" is something that the Publishers want to destroy entirely.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Also, if fans of the original don't like the look of thiis enw game, nobody is forcing them to buy it. If they loved the original that much, and hate the new one so much, simply don't buy it.

It's a little more complex than that.

The NEW IP will either crash - in which case it's a stain on the IP. Or perform, in which case it takes over from the OLD IP (See Transformers), in which case the old one is stained.

Same thing with Bond, Doctor Who, Highlander, Led Zeppelin, Guitar Hero or any other media. There's going to be a fragment of it that you really don't like, and that can spoil the whole experience for you. If you want to talk wistfully about something from Syndicate, and you have to explain which one, then it's already aggravating.

If you've re-imagined it, then the two IPs don't actually cross in anything but name. Would you want to watch the original Mission Impossible based on Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible? Probably not.

So the New IP hurts the old IP, whether you acknowledge it or not.

That's the real problem. Ask the fans of Silent Hill.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

As a fan of shooters, I'm honestly wondering if every single game company thinks a perfect game requires shooting mechanics.

Because no, it doesn't. imo, the best way to kill a genre is to keep feeding it with numerous installments. It doesn't matter if they're all the second coming of a gaming Jesus or something; if you keep giving us the same concept every time with just a new storyline and a new character and possibly a new gimmick, we're eventually going to get bored of it.

I hope it doesn't take the death of the FPS genre in order for people to realize this, because I luv FPSs, and I don't want to see that happen to them.

 

[b3nn3tt]

Also, if fans of the original don't like the look of thiis enw game, nobody is forcing them to buy it. If they loved the original that much, and hate the new one so much, simply don't buy it.

It's a little more complex than that.

The NEW IP will either crash - in which case it's a stain on the IP. Or perform, in which case it takes over from the OLD IP (See Transformers), in which case the old one is stained.

Same thing with Bond, Doctor Who, Highlander, Led Zeppelin, Guitar Hero or any other media. There's going to be a fragment of it that you really don't like, and that can spoil the whole experience for you. If you want to talk wistfully about something from Syndicate, and you have to explain which one, then it's already aggravating.

If you've re-imagined it, then the two IPs don't actually cross in anything but name. Would you want to watch the original Mission Impossible based on Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible? Probably not.

So the New IP hurts the old IP, whether you acknowledge it or not.

That's the real problem. Ask the fans of Silent Hill.

I'd never thought of it like that actually. That's a very good point. In which case, I've got to fall back on the brand recognition argument, because I can't see any other reason why they'd call it Syndicate.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

I'd never thought of it like that actually. That's a very good point. In which case, I've got to fall back on the brand recognition argument, because I can't see any other reason why they'd call it Syndicate.

And which leaves the brand recognition as a version of emotional blackmail ("It could be as good as you remember it being" - which, of course, it will never be).

That's why emotions run high from the "NO SYNDICATE" side.

The "THIS SYNDICATE" side tend to be people who never experienced the recognition, and so are fighting to have it themselves.

It's a very dirty game being played. Faction stirring just for hype. But then this is from the people who have boobies everywhere else. Not the most subtle of companies.

 

[Bonecrusher]

See what bugs me here is not changing the genre, syndicate was always an action game and action - shooter is less of a jump than turn based strategy to shooter.. but look at the screenshots.

Syndicate was a really grim cyberpunk game about a world where guys with trenchcoats, ludicrously dyed hair and excessive cybernetics hack peoples brains or ventilate them with miniguns while hyped up on combat drugs, all in the name of corporate interest.

This game doesn't even have the distinction of looking like Human Revolution, it looks like Mass Effect or Half Life 2 with clean environments, sleek technology and rugged, dark haired protagonist types.

interesting thing is,
80's movies were more darker, detailed, dirtier and atmospheric.
today people are encountered with sleek, clean, smooth things.
Ok it was good with Portal but not everything should be lab-clean.

 

[B33J33]

I'm still hopefull. letting go of the isometric viewy-game kinda sucks (loved it back in the day), but Starbreeze (Chronicles of Ridick) could aim for a cross-over between ye olde Syndicate and HR which could be an awesome gift to humanity imho

 

[Quiotu]

Tell you what, I'll give your desires thought if you can name me more than three modern squad-based, tactical RTS games for consoles that actually sold well and got critical acclaim. I'll even give you the first two for free: Halo Wars and Dragon Age.

I cared about this point until you said "Consoles".
And right there the point became clear. More on this later.

If you nix "real time" from strategy and tactics, you can easily make these sorts of games on consoles. Hell, the original XCOM games used Time-Units and turns, but I suppose the assumption now is that your stereotypical fratwad Xbox 360 gamer wouldn't play it...

Really, play the first two games again and tell me they work well anymore. I'm even a fan of the series, and I can admit that they did NOT age well. Putting HD textures on them and calling it a next gen title won't help that.

Deus Ex proved that you can take an older design and bring it up to modern standards without sacrificing the entire genre. Before you say "Well, Deus Ex 1 was also a shooter.." you will find that it doesn't play AT ALL like most shooters; today or then.

I get what you want... but you don't reboot a franchise by putting a new coat of paint on a 16 year old game and slapping it on Steam, bypassing consoles completely.

This is part of where the ire comes from.
They dredge up old PC-games/IP and then they truncheon them over the head with the Console-marketing-stick until they no longer contain anything but REFERENCES to the elements that made them successful in the first place. The results in the franchise ceasing to retain its mechanical identity and thus it gets turned into generic mediocre garbage.

What this tells me: The IP is just there to sucker players of the older Syndicate games into buying their new shooter. Exactly like XCOM.

It slays me that we live in an age where BOTH MODERN CONSOLES (no, not the Wii. That's last-gen tech.) have access to USB Mouse and Keyboard, yet nobody is even trying to develop strategy games for them.
(And this is the same market demographic who paid 100 bucks for Steel Battalion's controller?)

And it's all because of an "image problem" that many perpetuate but few are willing to defy or change.

"Nobody will buy tactics games on console because the developer assumes that their audience assumes that they will suck. Their audience assumes they will suck because nobody develops them."

It's a Mobius Loop of assumptions. I'd wager that if consoles started making small unit tactics games the genre could grow, and we'd have more solutions for the controller problem.


Until then, we're stuck in this console-only shit-cycle where older properties keep getting rebooted and "reinvented" for the maximum exploitation of nostalgia at the minimum of design effort.
Distinction has become the new "niche", and in today's gaming industry, "niche" is something that the Publishers want to destroy entirely.

Once again, I'm not exactly against the idea of making a true sequel to the Syndicate games... I just understand that it's never going to happen, and I'm not going to pointlessly ***** about it. Whether you like it or not, games that are PC-only are a dying breed. MMOs and a few exceptions notwithstanding, PC games simply do not sell like they did 10 or 15 years ago.

The choices are either to spend more money to make a modern Syndicate game, but cater it to consoles because that's who's buying games right now. Or spend less money, make a PC game that borrows engines and programming, and make what people would probably conceive as a half-assed attempt and even MORE of a cash-in. It's lose-lose for the devs, so you may as well go all in.

And it's easy understanding why it's being done. It's way easier to bring back a dead but established IP and reboot it than think of something new. Happens in the movie industry all the time... and sadly, it works. Those complaining aren't wrong, but there's no reason to boycott something that might actually turn out to be good. You can dislike the change, but don't drop all faith until you see what comes out in the end.

First impressions can be awfully wrong at times. I didn't like how the new SSX looked at first either, but once more information came out, most of us realized they were doing it right. EA can make something good with an established IP.

Calm. The fuck. Down. I want way more information than this before I pick a side.

 

[ZombieGenesis]

I get the feeling gaming is moving towards some kind of first person shooter singularity.

Has nobody noticed that these games are essentially identical to a coconut shy? Just costing millions to produce.

 

[Iron Criterion]

What's next? Crusader: No Remorse remade as an FPS?

Civilisation VI: The FPS years? Mind you since that series is gradually dumbing down it wouldn't be all that surprising.

 

[Waaghpowa]

It was simplified none the less, going from an FPS rpg to an FPS with RPG elements. Best example is the whole weapon proficiency, or the lack there of. That and basically forcing you to just take on the bosses in a closed off room where you can't do much other than shoot them in the face.

Boss fights: Yeah, those were straight up ass. Hell, I would have even been fine with forcing to fight them, if the story expanded upon who they are, why they do what they do, and why you'd have to kill them in the first place. If it did that, I'd be just fine with being forced to kill them. But it didn't, which is a great shame.

As for the weapon proficiency: Well Jenson's an ex-SWAT commander, so him being proficient in all kinds of weapons makes sense story-wise.

I can agree with the whole swat thing, but I can't help but feel that it still lacked complexity. JC was a trained agent, yet you could still specialize in certain weapons. Would it have been so hard to give Adam the proficiency of using every weapon but with some sort of perk you could spec into?

I guess the general consensus is your average gamer is just too stupid and impatient to handle squad based games these days?

Or at least console gamer's, since Deus Ex, although rather good, was fairly simple compared to the original. (Please see ZP episode regarding Deus ex HR)

Speaking of the subject of Deus Ex Human Revolution... don't you think This new Syndicate game is trying at match the art style? It seriously seemed to smack of a similar tone in the screens >.>

Now that you mention it, yes. Though I doubt it was to capitalize on DX:HR's success as it's likely that this game has been in development for a while.

 

[fozzy360]

Seeing as how the original Syndicate games were before my time as a gamer, I'll take a wait and see approach. What gives me a good amount of faith in the project is the fact that Starbreeze is developing, which is very welcome news.

That said, I find it quite humorous how people are collectively losing their shit over this. We have seven screenshots and a press release to tell us what this game is all about, and that's it. Yet, we have declarations and affirmations that Syndicate will be shit, a hollow shell of should have been, the death of the gaming industry. A press release and seven screenshots is enough to confirm that? I can understand the hate on something like Modern Warfare because we've already had two installments and now several videos to show us how little the game has changed between these installments. This, on the other hand, has so little information out, we can barely make a judgment on the art style, let alone gameplay.

This game might be shit (doubt it) or this game might be great. Impossible to tell until we get some real info later down the line.

 

[Cranky_Gamer]

I was really hoping for another (real) Syndicate game, but alas. On the upside, there's a possibility they'll re-release the original Syndicate and Syndicate Wars. If they do, I would love to see them on GoG but expect they'll use Origin.