Nightshape

I picked up Too Human for like

Trick question? This seems like a thinly veiled attempt to troll the few NMA people we have left. Obviously it is a better idea to try to appeal to the widest audience possible from a business perspective. Companies do what they do to make money, not to appease a bunch of crazy hardcore fans, I'd like to hear someone try to argue the opposite. Fallout 3 is just an example, one that we all know of, I could use others.

So I've been thinking about something for a while now, and I thought I'd air it out, see what you guys thought so on and so forth. Also, these are my own opinions, I'm not a mouthpiece for any company, but I would be very interested in hearing what you think in regards to what I feel is sound business logic. I'm thinking of games which are traditionally PC IP, like Fallout for example, and how fallout has jumped from PC only to being a multi-format IP, a few other games have done this, now what I have noticed is that the few obsessive/hardcore fans get really really upset, I mean the hardcore fallout fans went mental, they were really unhappy about the fact that Fallout 3 would be Oblivion with guns. Now back track a little, a small hardcore group of fans is obviously upset, now is it better to appease that small group of fans and make a niche game, or to make a game which has a far wider appeal, which is infact the case with fallout 3, we can't really say different because it's sold bucket loads of copies so obviously has a much wider appeal. From a business perspective, cleaning out the old skool fans, despite the noise they will make is probably a smart move as after all the reason companies make games is to make money, and those old guard hardend fans are actually far fewer than the potential audiance. I personally believe that, while harsh, in order to reboot an IP, you HAVE to burn the old fans, and business wise Bethesda, the example I am using here, did an awesome job with FO3 in rebooting the IP, while at the same time burning the crazies over at NMA and such. Just my 2 pence. So do you believe it's wrong? Should intellectual properties keep doggiedly to their roots to appeal to a small hardcore, or should they branch out, and if needs be, burn the biggest fans of the IP in an attempt to reach a larger audience?

MS WERD + occasional flowcharts usually. Sometimes with a little photoshop/illustrator work over screenshots or drawings. l33t skillz of da designer! No Excel spread sheet? But you guys are like producers and have special Excel powers!

I haven't even finished Uncharted yet...

Trolling YoP was such a lame thing to do, but man, I loved making everyone go mental by saying the US sucks balls.

Total win lad \m/

I've done and witnessed enough rendering coding to realise there is a fair amount of time spent sat with the artists and art directior tweaking values to get the best result. You'd be surprised how flat the textures are actually before code is applied, but then again maybe not, because Risen demonstrates pre-lit, unbalanced flat texturing in all it's glory, so maybe you HAVE seen a bad result before . Seriously... This is getting ridiculious. I'm sorry that my surly mood yesturday has obviously upset a few people. I'm sorry for my rash comments, I could have taken more care in how I said what I said. I'm sorry people.

That's right, because my choice of Avatar is collative of my technical and practical games development knowledge. I don't see the correlation personally, but clearly you're able to make leaps of logic which are far more advanced than my own. I am in absolute awe.

Risen plays well, it's a lovely experience, it just lacks visual polish and balance. I mean considering that Risen's budget was likely extremely small when compared with the likes of Oblivion. It's just a matter of quality really. In terms of have they clearly layed out the direction for the art, sure, it's a tropical island with a 17th-century Spanish colony feel. In that respect it's a success, but it isn't executed at the same level as competitors. Fact of the matter for me is that it plays like an old school rpg, and I love that, but I'm not going to claim that it has any visually redeeming qualities like alot of folk are doing. It's consistant to a level artistically, but it certainly isn't executed consistantly. They've had to recycle alot, because that's all they could afford, and thats fine, I'm able to deal with that. Technology-wise, it's not really doing anything, it pretty much feels flat and diffuse, the lighting is servicable. Like I've said previously, the way they've gone about light scatttering is quite nice, mostly because it's a different approach, but realitically speaking, HDR/Bloom is poorly configured, textures are uneven and poorly balanced in the way that they react to light. It's tiny things that are really only visible when you go looking for it. Risen works, it would work regardless are what you shoved ontop of it graphically, and that's why I like it. I tend to feel it's proper old skool awesome gamage vibe, with big enough balls to say, screw the mainstream, so what that we can't afford enough artwork to make people unique, we'll deliver gameplay, story, and world.

Huh? Tigranes, don't take the post as a personal attack please, because it's not meant to be an insult, you have your opinion however wrong I may feel it is, and that's your right, this is just merely my reaction. It's not complicated. I just can't believe anyone, that's right ANYONE would think Risen has good art direction, I am left with the knowledge that you either don't know what art direction is or you're a truly tasteless human being. Risen may well be a fine game, which it is in my opinion, a damn fine game, but to claim that it has any redeeming qualities in relation to art style, consistency and technology is lunacy. It is to accept mediocrity and proclaim it king. That said I've almost come to accept such binal, inane, prognosis of games from this forum. I dunno, it's almost like you're all so easy to fool, that when you're shown something that is sigificant in it's technology, appearance and art style you're all concerned with it at such a skin deep level that the subtle differences aren't even noticed when they're not there. Everything from balancing texture art so it's consistant throughout environments, to correctly tweak the reaction of HDR, through to the ability of the artists across the many texture maps, it's probably just me expecting more of fans. I'm glad people are liking Risen, I just wish it was for the correct reasons sometimes.

Risen hasn't seen art driection OMFG.

Well net code is just about sending the state of the game from the server to the clients, and updating that state, the problems are likely not related to anything more than a few messages being garbled and not handled quite elegantly enough. The problem as far as I know with network code is it's extremely hard to debug, as it requires network traffic to be monitored, etc... It's also not easy to recreate real world conditions, but obviously companies try. I'm sure these problems will be fixed, but network code is extremely challenging. Oh but here's something funky, we have one of the network coders from Media Molecule working at our place now. random fact I wanted to share.

Net code is all message based.

use's raknet. http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/

There is actually a very good technical reason why you can't join a game in progress.

I'm not biased, I just realise that the games industry doesn't always work in the way the fans percieve, the DLC is probably something that it made sense to sort out. That said, the EA factor makes me a little skeptical.

I want an EU release BAD!

DLC is perfectly valid, I see absolutely no point in whining about DLC on launch. Extra DLC content for SPECIAL EDITIONS, is a big thing. Having the DLC at launch allows a team to practice using the mechanics in place, and thus turn around more DLC in the long term. Oh and the truth of the matter is simple, all games are eventually going to be DLC.

Do you like it?

Risen's tech is fairly basic, and certainly the 360 version looks worse than the PC version, kinda expected as much, but all the same it's not that far beyond Gothic 3, it's fine, and does the job, weighing up the result to performance. It's not bleeding edge. And as you note the character art, and I could even say the art in general, isn't top notch. The word i would use to describe what I see is servicable, with the occasional nice touch. I believe it's a great achievement for a small team. On another note, Frostbite does most of it's destruction via basic mesh swopping (to be blunt, it's crap, smoke an mirror's which seem's awesome because most people haven't seen anything all that much better), Red Faction's engine would actually provide better results, I'd certainly like to see what you're mentioning in an RPG, I don't think there are enough FPS's out there prooving good destruction tech yet. 4-5 years though and I imagine it'll be a common feature in RPG's. That said Diablo 3 looks to be doing some interesting stuff.

mkreku, if there is one thing everyone should agree on, Risen looks awful. I do like the godray system they have in place though.

Yeah, but considering the size of the dev team, I can forgive the recycling of models.