trty00 said:
Namehere said:
trty00 said:
Draconalis said:
trty00 said:
This might sound harsh, but... too bad. Seriously, how are we going to get anywhere if we spend all our time curtailing to EXACTLY what fans want?
How are we going to get anywhere when you have to rebuild your fan-base from scratch because you pissed off the existing fan-base?
As I already said, this new game does not negate the existence of previous titles, if this new iteration makes them that enraged, then they can completely ignore it and go play the previous titles.
Look, I'm trying my best not to sound like some artsy-fartsy dope, but all I can say is that video games are an artistic medium and they need to be given room to grow. Fan service is nice, but you can't really progress if that's all you want to focus on. If you want to be like Nintendo and just feed nostalgia, go right ahead, but don't expect me to consider your games truly interesting by any stretch.
BULLSHIT! Sorry, sorry, something stuck in my throat there...
Maybe when you design video games they're an 'artistic medium'. But there is a fundamental difference between a picture and a picture that is 'art'. These differences are well recognized by professionals called 'commercial artists' whose techniques are vastly different from their 'artsy' counter parts, even though their tools are similar.
X-Com was a pioneering video game series when it was first released, accordingly we like to think of it as art for some reason. Let us not forget that for pioneering that field it made a fair sum of money. And now its back and trying to make more. It created something we call: 'a market.' This is not a Picasso or a Rembrandt, this is a product.
If you wish to make artsy things, go wild. But this ain't one of them. And much as fans of Star Trek lamented every new step taken by Rick Berman, which time and sanity have revealed to have been poor steps to say the least, it is fair that someone should fear the safety of their beloved franchise when it branches off in some weird direction. For something more modern, take Star Gate. The original series was great to its fans. Atlantis went kind of down hill for some reason and then there was Universe, which lasted for all of half a season. There is now no more Star Gate. The money that might have been invested in movies for Atlantis and another one for the original series, was dumped into a failed expansion into the franchise, and now its all but mortally wounded. There are no future releases of any sort planed. End of story, quite literally.
In this instance I don't see X-Com taking a major risk. The fan base their seeking out is so removed from the current one any failures of the shooter to deliver won't be seen as a failure to deliver on the core game, so it shouldn't hurt the core game's development too badly. If it does work out great, another FPS.
To summarize; Art is art, its out there. But commercial art comes with commercial risk. And people fascinated by whatever aspect of X-Com have valid concerns, even if they are somewhat overstated most likely.
Yeah... no. Just because something is part of a brand or is a "commercial product" doesn't mean it can't try something new. As far as I'm concerned, despite the fact that I despise his films, Michael Bay has just as much artisitc clout as Stanley fucking Kubrick. Simple as.
This is clearly a spin-off title, and the developers, as autonomous human beings, have the right to take X-Com in whatever god-damn direction they want, backlash be damned.
Am I... a goat? There's a foul odor of old river water and stale troll, but I shall try this one more time.
The video game industry. The movie industry. The literary... industry. You will notice these are 'industrial' as in, form pressed, manufactured and mass produced quickly and economically competitively... at least in theory. This game is not being made by Notch. That could arguably be called art. Arguably. A game produced by a major publisher isn't art unless they've gone out of their way to make it art. Like the way Tolkien got published. The guys who published him were running a business. They had a reputation to maintain, but started making money off of less 'reputable' books. To keep their mystique they figured they'd publish some book by a medieval historian, which Tolkien was, not realizing it was more of that shlock that was giving them a bad name. Tolkien was art. Tolkien didn't meet deadlines, didn't rush his work, he finished it one day and handed it over and people published it without looking. That was also a brilliant stroke of luck for all involved. X-Com is past that. It's a commercial issue, running on deadlines, answering to publishers not developers. Developers answer to their publishers and funding sources, not their whims. That's the difference between 'commercial art' and 'art.' Most people who make 'art' don't get steady pay and don't have an office or any support mechanism financially speaking to answer to that directly applies to their art. Its where you get the rumors of so-called 'starving artists.' Something you aren't when you get a paid regularly for drawing Dante cells all day long. Producing a good image of Date for the DMC series as cell animation or however they do it now, is the definition of Commercial Art, and it's quite different from 'art'.
To compare Michael Bay to any form of art, to compare almost any Hollywood production to art is distasteful. One observes certain elements of film to find art, but Hollywood's at the bottom of that list. Under, believe it or not, yes wacky kung fu and samurai films and Bollywood. Cleopatra was shaping up to be serious art, it cost more then the events it aimed to chronicle and was meant to be a trilogy. It bankrupted the studio, so it was slashed down to a single long move, ala Lawrence of Arabia length, and released with all the fanfare imaginable. Saved the studio. Wasn't the 'art' the director and the original producer were aiming for, but it made enough money to keep the studio alive. That's business, and game production studios are no different then movie production studios in Hollywood, that's why the bottom line is cost value assessment, not quality. That's why micro transactions and on disk DLC, not quality 'expansions' and reasonable prices.
You know what a real artist does when his or her project isn't going to vision? They scrap it and start again. It's not entirely about the money, there's something else driving an artist, something inside. An artist can spend his or her day painting soup can labels for a corporation and go home attempting to paint the perfect mare in a field landscape. But the art is in that painting at home, not the soup can. That's just how he or she earns his or her money, as sure as if they happened to paint houses all day and murals all night.
Not once did I say that they didn't have the right to take the IP in any direction they wanted. I said that the fans have just as much right to complain and worry over it. If you're entitled to defend them blindly, surely the fans are entitled to panic as blindly at their actions? I don't complain or endorse the actions of those developing this new game, I contest your assertion that everyone else has to just shut up about it because you'd like them to. It would also be nice if you'd learn the difference between commercial art and art.
I sincerely hope I haven't fed the troll.
