Is anyone else baffled by the fact that--having acquired the intellectual rights to a franchise that many regard as having given its name to the greatest PC game ever (X-COM, and UFO Defense in particular), 2K is making a first-person shooter out of it? Whether it's passably good is beside the point--it's exceedingly irritating to see currently trendy developers à la Bethesda or 2K buy up the rights to legendary elder titles and make sequels that are essentially unrelated, and grok their gameplay myopically from games they've developed. Look at Fallout 3--it borrows a few atmospheric details, sure, but the Fallout series' tongue-in-cheek character and overhead view were both thrown entirely to the wayside.
XCOM Trailer [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHGvNW4fhhI]
Ultimately, this whole problem relates to the lack of respect video games receive as art, particularly in relation to their creators--when Doom 3 came out, for example, the lackluster gaming press hyped it beyond any reasonable standard, whilst uniformly failing to mention that a Doom game developed without either John Romero or Tom Hall is analogous to a Beatles album without John Lennon or George Harrison. Ultimately, a game's title--and, for that matter, its developer--are just names. What matters is the talent involved, and the lack of attention paid to this, even by supposedly enlightened critical outlets, is often disturbing. This is particularly inexplicably since gamers, as a collective, seem to often be aware, at least retrospectively, of when a series begins to decline, but rarely draw the connection directly to personnel. By my count, for example, Final Fantasy IX was the last Final Fantasy composed of more than irrelevancies. Surprise!--it was also the last one Hironobu Sakaguchi worked on.
And I can cite many, many more--id, as mentioned before, began to decline after Quake II; the last game John Romero had a hand in (they've now withdrawn from creating saleable engines; a trend that began with Q3 Arena was roundly perceived as inferior to Unreal/UT, both as an engine and a game). The Metroid series was essentially shelved after Gunpei Yokoi was fired from Nintendo, before being resurrected as a 3D FPS by--har, har-- a Texas-based developer, Retro Studios. Rare began to go downhill after many of its employees left to form Free Radical, including David Doak (Nintendo's sale of Rare looks remarkably fortuitous in hindsight, like trading an aging athletic superstar for enough money to attain a draft). More obviously, Bullfrog struggled to innovate after the departure of Peter Molyneux, and Origin fell apart after botching Ultima IX under EA pressure and Richard Garriott's exiting of the company.
So what do you guys think? Do developers--and franchises--get the respect they deserve? And, if not, to what extent does this have to do with our attitudes as gamers?
XCOM Trailer [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHGvNW4fhhI]
Ultimately, this whole problem relates to the lack of respect video games receive as art, particularly in relation to their creators--when Doom 3 came out, for example, the lackluster gaming press hyped it beyond any reasonable standard, whilst uniformly failing to mention that a Doom game developed without either John Romero or Tom Hall is analogous to a Beatles album without John Lennon or George Harrison. Ultimately, a game's title--and, for that matter, its developer--are just names. What matters is the talent involved, and the lack of attention paid to this, even by supposedly enlightened critical outlets, is often disturbing. This is particularly inexplicably since gamers, as a collective, seem to often be aware, at least retrospectively, of when a series begins to decline, but rarely draw the connection directly to personnel. By my count, for example, Final Fantasy IX was the last Final Fantasy composed of more than irrelevancies. Surprise!--it was also the last one Hironobu Sakaguchi worked on.
And I can cite many, many more--id, as mentioned before, began to decline after Quake II; the last game John Romero had a hand in (they've now withdrawn from creating saleable engines; a trend that began with Q3 Arena was roundly perceived as inferior to Unreal/UT, both as an engine and a game). The Metroid series was essentially shelved after Gunpei Yokoi was fired from Nintendo, before being resurrected as a 3D FPS by--har, har-- a Texas-based developer, Retro Studios. Rare began to go downhill after many of its employees left to form Free Radical, including David Doak (Nintendo's sale of Rare looks remarkably fortuitous in hindsight, like trading an aging athletic superstar for enough money to attain a draft). More obviously, Bullfrog struggled to innovate after the departure of Peter Molyneux, and Origin fell apart after botching Ultima IX under EA pressure and Richard Garriott's exiting of the company.
So what do you guys think? Do developers--and franchises--get the respect they deserve? And, if not, to what extent does this have to do with our attitudes as gamers?
