Temple Run 2 Hits 20 Million Downloads in Four Days
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
I see a lot of people claiming this sort of attitude is funny, but I have yet to see a single example of that attitude actually existing. "You just run and jump"? You mean like Mario, Sonic, and many other classics? Why do you think anyone would complain about this? Can you show a single example where anyone actually has? I doubt it. Why not just present the news on its own, instead of throwing in this pointless whining about how some imaginary people might have complained about it?Grey Carter said:
EDITed for extra delicious irony. [sub]And 'cause I like being a smartass. EDIT - Which doesn't work so well when the person above you beats you to it. DAMN!![/sub]Grey Carter said:
OT: I've got Temple Run and it's sequel for my iPad, and they're actually pretty addictive. So yeah, all you can do is duck, jump, dodge left or right and turn, but as the game gets quicker and quicker the better you get what starts out as laid back casual screen swiping ends up becoming an exercise in concentration and reflexes that puts even the legendary Battletoad's hoverbike levels to shame.
In fact ... obstacles you have to dodge left or right of, obstacles you have to jump over or duck under, increasing speed as you advance through the level ... what are the gameplay differences between Temple Run and Battletoad's bike levels again?
There's also Temple Run for Android, and there will be Temple Run 2 on Thursday. Subway Surfers is better than the first Temple Run, though, by quite a bit. So is Jetpack Joyride. It'll be interesting to see how the new one stacks up.rhizhim said:
It's a bit exaggerated, but go look at any thread where people are discussing the overall merits of smartphone gaming. You get a significant portion of gamers going "smartphone gaming is nice for casuals who are okay with crap like Angry Birds and Temple Run, but I want something meatier." Said gamers apparently have never looked at either the app store or the google play store, because there are plenty of "core" experiences sitting right next to the casual time killers. My android smart phone is the best gaming handheld I've ever owned, bar none.Kahani said:
True, but I'd argue that Crash had better aesthetics, better soundtrack and more variety.You had dark levels, ruin levels, sewer levels, snow levels etc. etc., and each one had their own little gameplay thing. Ice levels had the slippery ice, sewer levels had hanging in the ceilings + electricity water, swamp/water levels had the waterboard etc.rhizhim said:
Also, aside from the standard way of completing the game (aka finding the crystals), you had colored gems, hidden levels etc. etc.
While you "just" run and jump in Bandicoot, I'd argue it did it better than Temple Run. I'm not trying to hate on this game, I'm just saying that you can't claim it to be at the same level as Crash.
Am I one of the only people who doesn't have a problem with casual gaming? I think it's done wonders for the industry and indie developers. Temple Run IS a good game. It doesn't rely on a pay to win strategy like Angry Birds does and I find that very reassuring that casual games are taking a step in the right direction. I just don't like it when games get branded casual because they have simple mechanics.
I think Grey is kind of being an intentional troll by missing the issue given that he at least understands it, or should given all the posts I've written in response to "Critical Miss". He has a dry sense of humor at times.doggie015 said:
The issue with casual games is less that people play them than the influance they have on the industry and the development of "serious" games. Ideally it wouldn't matter if the industry was producing bucketloads of games for all kinds of players and everyone could get what they want and be happy. Then the issue of "well, if people are having fun, nobody should be upset that this game is popular and making tons of money" neglects the central issue.
The thing is that casual games are generally cheap to make and in catering to the lowest human denominator, even if that's not all that plays them, they can sell bucketloads of copies. A "studio" of 3 people selling 20 million copies of something that probably cost peanuts to make is generating a huge profit for the cost of development.
Big companies like EA, Activision, etc... tend to look only at the money, not what differant demographics of gamers want, what is fair, or what is good for gaming as a whole. The bottom line is that a casual game, whether it's a "Temple Run" or a "Call Of Duty" (which is a casual game, just for a differant kind of casual) the bottom line is that your going to make more money for your investment than you will by say developing a deep, epic, RPG that would be lost on most people. Sure the RPG might make a decent profit, enough to justify it's investment, but in an industry less concerned with simply making money, than with the rate of projected growth (considering a failure to meet projected growth as a loss), it's increasingly not worth the effort.
The end result is that everything is designed to be accessible and playable by as large an audience as possible, an audience that increasingly feels it's entitled to success. The issue isn't so much intristicly with the "Filthy Casual" (as Jim Steling jokingly puts it) being there, but with the stagnation they cause within the industry. See, if I'm a veteran RPG player who has spend decades crawling through the darkest forests and deepest depths RPGs have produced, I want games that are going to become increasingly deep, customizable, and challenging to someone like me, an advanced player with a lot of experience and probably tens of thousands of hours logged with the genere. A casual might be lost when they see a term like "THAC0" but I most certainly am not. When RPGs become few and far between, and the ones that are released are simplified to an "introductory" level, minimizing stats, skill selection, customization, and other things for the sake of being accessible to the largest possible audience that becomes a problem to the more hardcore crowd because we're beyond that and want to move on, and we know it can be done. We also know we're a profitable group, but the insulting bit is that we're simply not profitable enough.
The problem is also compounded to an extent by the fact that many people who start as casuals, and get seriously into gaming and good enough at it to progress, really can't do it, because there is increasingly little that doesn't involve the most basic gaming skills. If a short, somewhat patronizing tutorial can't instruct a player there seems to be little interest in developing a game.
Now, to be fair, there are still some pretty deep games accross a variety of generes developed by indies. The thing is though that as playable as these games might be, most of them look like arse. The quality that can be achieved by a tiny handfull of people with no real budget, or even a couple million from a kickstarter, is nothing compared to a AAA title. As a hardcore gamer I want my depth, but I also want a quality, AAA experience. It's increasingly a case where to be a gamer you either have to go with quality of complexity, especially when it comes to RPGs and other generes which get extremely hardcore when taken to their logical conclusion (though they can be done at an introductory level as we've been seeing).
At any rate, this is the divide between real gamers, and the legions of casuals. The issues aren't so much with the casual gamers as individuals, but what they have done to gaming as a group. See, nobody cares of a bunch of "Bros" want to play shooters, that in of itself is no big deal. The problem is when the Bros outnumber the serious gamers 10 to 1, so when a company like EA that has the resources to make a really high quality game decides what to develop, they put the resources into a "Call Of Duty" rather than an epic RPG for advanced players for example. At the best you might see a decent RPG come out every couple of years, where your "shooter" franchises usually get a yearly installmet, and usually there are half a dozen to choose from. What's more when those decent RPGs come out, rather than becoming more complex and letting you do more things, they become increasingly casual in hopes of bringing in those "bros". This leads to desicians like making Mass Effect more shooter-like, adding action components to Dragon Age as opposed to more phased, thought based, combat. The whole "I want to actually whack someone, as opposed to watching my guy take his time in whacking someone" bit which arguably defeats the purpose of an RPG, stats, depth in a combat system, etc... With every installment a game like "Elder Scrolls" involves less skills/stats and becomes more about actively dodging and swinging your weapon as they aim for an increasingly casual audience.
At any rate, for those that read this far, the issue isn't that people like me hate "Temple Run" or that it made a ton of money, or even really hate the people that play it. We hate the fact that a success like this means that we're even less likely to get the games that we want, as more effort go into emulating this. Nobody would likely care, and there would be no "serious gamer vs. casual gamer" divide if everyone could get what they want in satisfying quantities.
