Archangel3371 said:Well you are basically saying it's easier to fart out games GG. I think that you're really selling the effort it takes to make a quality game these days really short. With more powerful tech and tools come more expectations and alot more knowledge of how to utilize it all. This is obvious because each successive generation the cost and the size of development studios continually increase. I indeed find games like Gears of War have a very distinct personality. The characters easily shine through individually in their dialog. Obviously it's not going to be the same personality as a Mario game. That's were I think the problem lies in that you're looking for a reason that will make YOU feel the same about Gears that I feel and people have different tastes so what you look for isn't going to always the same as mine. However everybody usually has overlapping similarities to various degrees because there are games that we do share the same likes for like Mario Galaxy. Also my taste does extend beyond the big blockbuster games as I totally loved God Hand.
Silence fool, you are ruining my awesome thread derail 
gamingeek said:Why Clara G?
Wow Clara really likes fists.
I just see a bunny skull & cross bones the Clara G pic I assume you tried to post so I did a quick google search and went to her official site. :shock: Woo hoo! 
Archangel3371 said:Well you are basically saying it's easier to fart out games GG. I think that you're really selling the effort it takes to make a quality game these days really short. With more powerful tech and tools come more expectations and alot more knowledge of how to utilize it all. This is obvious because each successive generation the cost and the size of development studios continually increase. I indeed find games like Gears of War have a very distinct personality. The characters easily shine through individually in their dialog. Obviously it's not going to be the same personality as a Mario game. That's were I think the problem lies in that you're looking for a reason that will make YOU feel the same about Gears that I feel and people have different tastes so what you look for isn't going to always the same as mine. However everybody usually has overlapping similarities to various degrees because there are games that we do share the same likes for like Mario Galaxy. Also my taste does extend beyond the big blockbuster games as I totally loved God Hand.
If this knowledge existed before then why didn't we have all these consistent top notch productions in the Xbox era? There were a few high profile technically proficient titles and a bunch of middling or poor looking games. You only have to look at an interview from F5 or even High Voltage which tells you how you have to know a system intimately and create tech on lower powered systems. It was and is simply harder to get better looking games on lower powered systems which don't have the power or tools utilise.
The cost and size of games has increased because more and more artists are needed to get HD games looking the way they do. I've seen studios saying that the big cost increase is in creating assets and that is why you are seeing a lot outsourcing of development. Companies like DIMPS do work for other peoples games and companies like EA have even set up frameworks like Blueprint or Armature as a way of co-ordinating many disparate studios into working on one project.
I'm not saying that Gears needs to feel like mario either, but that I find that it combines many aspects of other games or genres and doesn't come through with a distinct personality of its own, to me. And I'm not just talking about the characters occasionally cracking dialogue, I'm not talking about characters as in people in the game, but an overall feeling.
Moving on to unspecific examples, with games in general, I don't find this copy and pasting, this mass mugging of concepts where everybody tries to grab the best bits from other games that appealing. In action games in particular you are seeing games taking bits, from camera views, QTEs, cover systems, inventory management, themes, weapons etc.
FPS used to copy Goldeneye incessently and now Halo incessently and I assume some are now copying COD4 incessently. Controls are even getting the same where you can flip between two FPS and virtually have the same button mapping. Being utterly melodramatic, it almost feels like a mass homogenising of genres. But this isn't a new phenomena.
Another point is that with bigger costs come far less willingness to take risks. If you're hiring hundreds of people for one production, and spending millions, then you're going to be far less willing to take risks because more depends on the success of the game. So you'll probably concentrating entirely on the technical side of things, as technically proffecient games (regardless of whether they're any fucking fun) will score great, but more importantly get a fair amount of hype.
De Blob is a game that despite critically doing better than some high profile epic looking games, gets less attention because it doesn't twang that nerve in heavy gamers that says, look at me, I'm big and flashy and epic. World of Goo is the same. But recentely in the UK at least you are seeing big, epic games getting buried in this winter period, Banjo, Mirror's Edge, Little Big Planet, Motorstorm 2, Disaster.
Now the problem becomes the risk vs reward, how much money was sunk into these games? A lower budget title can get by and even do well at over 600'000 sold. But when a big game doesn't bring in the big money then publishers are in trouble.
It's not just as simple as measuring success and sales comparitively, you have to look at budgets, revenue and profitability too. The games you are seeing doing well are sequels, big sequels. I'm not questioning the quality of those sequels, by all accounts the recent ones have been excellent. I like originality though and that's doesn't just mean new IP of a well worn genre, it means doing something different and exciting or quirky to make it special.
Archangel3371 said:Holy shit! Penny Flame is hoooooooot!
The day I first stumbled upon Penny Flame pics was a wonderful day. Totally my kind of chick.
Only 4% of games make a profit
The phrase "hits driven business" gets thrown around a lot these days, but in the case of video games it really is true. Creating video games and knowing what will actually lead to commercial success is not exactly a perfect science. There's no magic formula, and unfortunately that means game development nowadays is very, very risky. Millions upon millions of dollars can be invested in a game project, and sometimes the company is lucky to break even, let alone make a profit.
In fact, according to Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) – as reported by Forbes – roughly four percent of video games that make it to market are actually profitable. To think that 96 percent of video games only break even or lose money for publishers is somewhat alarming. Geoffrey Zatkin, who designed games for 11 years before co-founding EEDAR, noted, "Every game I have ever worked on, we've gone in blind as to which features would sell the game better."
Reworking or redesigning parts of a game can comprise 60 percent of a game's budget, according to EEDAR. Sometimes including an extra feature or mode can really make a difference but other times it might not. Zatkin, for example, said that not knowing for sure if the inclusion of multiplayer would be worth an extra $500,000 "would scare the crap out of me."
"No one or two things can determine the success or failure of a game," Zatkin noted. But a number of factors can point to a greater chance of success, such as release timing, the developer's pedigree, the genre, the platform(s) and the promise of downloadable content.
Personally I still feel the uniqueness myself with Gears of War even if you take out the characters. It doesn't really bother me if some other game did this or that first or whatever, stuff like that never did bother me. Why change something if it works? Why try to come up with something different if the cover system in Gears works as good as it does? Why not use QTE's if you can have it to put in some cool interactive cutscenes with it? I guess ultimately it comes down to personal preference. For me a game being unique isn't a qualifier at all for me liking it, as long as I enjoy the premise and of course it the game isn't horribly flawed in some then I'll most likely enjoy it.
Archangel3371 said:Personally I still feel the magic in today's games.
The magic is still there, hell much more so then the previous generation. People just have to look for it more.
One of the site's forefathers.
Play fighting games!
Archangel3371 said:Well GG I think you also need to factor in that developers and programmers get more proficient the longer and more often they work with their trade. Also ever since at least in the early years of the PS2 learning to program for videogames has never been easier with schools and classes set up specifically for that reason. I'm not saying that developments haven't helped but both them and the tech kind of keep an even pace maintaining a similar level of difficulty throughout. In fact that was one of the very reason Nintendo said they went with the tech that they did for the Wii, to make it easier for developers to make games.
Personally I still feel the uniqueness myself with Gears of War even if you take out the characters. It doesn't really bother me if some other game did this or that first or whatever, stuff like that never did bother me. Why change something if it works? Why try to come up with something different if the cover system in Gears works as good as it does? Why not use QTE's if you can have it to put in some cool interactive cutscenes with it? I guess ultimately it comes down to personal preference. For me a game being unique isn't a qualifier at all for me liking it, as long as I enjoy the premise and of course it the game isn't horribly flawed in some then I'll most likely enjoy it.
Sorry I'm late in replying Archie, great talking with you. I'm really tired lately.
For me, it's not being unique, it has to be unique AND good. I suppose for me it's like going on vacation every year to the same place, or going somewhere completely new and unexpected and being delighted by the experience. I never thought when I first started gaming that I would ever play, nor that anyone would ever make a scuba diving simulator and yet having that sense of discovery, playing something totally unexpected. That was a special experience to me, whilst playing a good game in a genre that I've played to death already, I just see the repitition, I see the joins, I can see where and how they've taken the bits from elsewhere. It's not that I think these well made games are bad or anything, they are extremely well made and solidly built, I just feel like they dont go the extra mile to differentiate themselves from each other.