Purkake

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I wonder why that happened? *points at evul EA* Are you kidding? Mythic missed deadline after deadline on WAR. If you go into work and start a 3 year project, and it gets stretched into a 5 year project, you have messed up and you are lucky you don't get fired. I'm surprised how much time they were actually given on the game. Duke Nukem Forever...

Ba dum tish. Welcome to corporate America!

What's left is a twisted mockery, making soulless games, desperately wanting to end the torment, but being kept alive by the evil magicks of EA.

It narrows your vocabulary? Also it induces a bad case of using all caps, a large font and striking colors.

And if you hated them just a little bit more, they would disappear off the face of earth. It's just a company, hating them isn't going to make them go away. Also, I hear that hating is bad for your brain.

But what if you could? Think of the possibilities! Hope you get internet soon

They should have called it Elf Age then... OT: Didn't you go AWOL some time ago?

Be sure to watch the extended ending, if you don't get it in the game(and you probably won't). It actually explains some of the backstory.

to Purkake: I will not yell against Source engine, althought i did not get similar results from Source than from UE3, and Source could be marked as last gen engine, because it is pretty old already (dont shoot me please for saying that please ) I don't really have anything against UE3 either, at least it keeps the costs down and (potentially) allows them to focus on other things like story and gameplay... It's super crazy that a lot of companies still make custom engines for all their games.

Source engine? But Valve is super awesome anyway... I just want more innovation, and less annual sequels. I understand that AAA titles can't really be experimental, that why we need indie games. Especially Activision. The CEO... has no soul.

Epic might not be the best game creator ever, but let be honest... could you imagine today's gaming without their 3D engines? I blame Unreal Engine 3 for all the weird shiny models in Bioshock etc. UE1 was a great improvement, though. EDIT: If you think there's no more innovation, check out the last Game Developer's Conference Experimental Games

Valve would be stupid to allow themselves to be bought, Steam is making them tons of money and their games aren't selling bad either. Epic, I couldn't care less about. People figured out that there are only a limited number of story types a long time ago - "the hero's journey", "the coming of age" etc. Yet people still make awesome movies and write great books. If you use the interactive medium creatively, you can make great stories. Any story can be made complex, that's the fault of the author, not the medium.

I seriously doubt that video games have reached their peak. That's why we need more experimental indie games, sure some of them will probably suck, but others will bring awesome new ideas. Speaking of innovations, have you seen Achron, the time-traveling RTS? Just because Dragon Age is unoriginal doesn't mean that you can't have better stories in games. The possibilities for new and interesting ways to tell stories with an interactive medium are staggering. You can have branching story lines, multiple independent stories that fold out differently each time, storytelling by an interactive world... People just need to try new things.

They are stagnating, because they spent more than 10 month with developing a game... Of course you sell less, if you spend making the game 5 times longer... Most of the Japanese companies prefer quality over quantity... The exactly same can be said about Final Fantasy XII for example... I'm not sure you understand what I mean by stagnating. That the whole JRPG genre is pretty much at FF1 with it's story and characters, there is no innovation, the only thing they are changing is the combat system. Having a real-time combat system was a great innovation... JRPGs are pretty much the definition of quantity over quality, there is so much grinding and going back to save points and redoing stuff. I'm not saying that short annual crap is any better, but at least it ends before you do(die of old age that is).

The EA today is just mildly better than the EA two years ago. This is not about EA or Square Enix. Oh, I don't play them, I just call it what it is. The Japanese game industry has been stagnating for a while now. Maybe that's because Half-Life 2 is a totally different game from HL1 and takes the story forward while introducing a lot of interesting things for the whole genre. Like I said, I didn't like Mirror's Edge, but I appreciate them trying something new, while Final Fantasy games are pretty much the same stuff over and over with higher budgets.

Why are they even considered RPGs anyway? It's not like you have any freedom to role-play anyway. As long as there's at least one weird plushy-thing, a companion who turns evil and one that was evil but turns good along with an overly complex stats system, it's a JRPG. Sorry, I also forgot that they occasionally change the protagonist's hair color, gender and the reason for their generic angst.

Are you seriously comparing Final Fantasy games which has except the name of few summons and monsters nothing in common and are developed for 5+ more years, with half baked ****s with 1 year development cycle??? Why yes, yes I am. They are all sequels and FF games are pretty much repeating the same age-old JRPG crap over and over and over again while occasionally changing the combat system. Mirror's Edge might not have been my favorite game, but at least it tried something new, same for Portal and World of Goo. I want more original games and less crap with increasingly bigger numbers on the end. He's still playing Fallout 3

Too Human Are Silicone Knights still in business?

That doesn't make it any cheaper. Word of mouth and a Steam sale can help boost the sales quite a bit without throwing millions on horrible TV ads and whatnot. It's also interesting how EA focused their Sims 3 marketing on big billboards and the general public instead of the narrow whiny "hardcore". Sims 3 sold 1.4 million in it's first week. And that is on the PC only with the game being pirated weeks before it's release.

No change there then... I've seen this work for puzzle games, platform games, simple arcade games, graphic adventure games. As for complex western CRPGs, I'm not sure I know anyone who's successfully working on that smaller scale other than Jeff Vogel. Otherwise, there are small projects in development whose release dates seem permanently fixed on "when it's done." I don't mean that as a knock against the capability of those guys, it's just that making an Arcanum or a Planescape: Torment takes a hell of a lot of time and more than a handful of people--people who need to be paid if they're going to work on something for "a hell of a lot of time." Making a PS:T or Arcanum would probably cost as much as making an indie game today(it would probably take longer, but indie games aren't made all that fast either), plus you get way more profit on digital distribution. The costs have gone WAY up with this generation, GTA IV was rumored to cost around $100 million with average AAA games being around $30 mil. In case someone didn't get the memo, Activision is the new evil. EA has actually released new original games like Mirror's Edge and is publishing Br

Obsidian is also privately held, so they have to agree to be bought.

Even though it's reassuring that Valve is privately held, I'm almost looking forward to the time when EA, Activision and every other major company merges into one supermassive ****hole. I think something like that is impossible to avoid (trying hard not to sound like some kind of Karl Marx of the computer game industry), followed of course by a surge of independent developers and low-budget games. It will be the renaissance of video games, a golden age where everyone can once again make awesome games. Hmm, maybe I should make an underwater city where the best game developers can make whatever games they want and not be held back by petty morality...

It sure seems to me that all this merging of late is a response to the increased expense of developing for consoles in this hardware cycle and the projected expense of developing for the next cycle. Making games with production values that are up to the standard expected by the XBOX/PS3 audience is a tall order for a small, independent company. Which is why I mentioned indie games and digital distribution. A small company can make awesome games and make money without wasting too much money on XBL, PSN, Wiiware and Steam/whatever. The costs are pretty much bleeding the AAA games' developers dry. To be fair, BGaE and Psychonauts got little to no marketing making it the publishers' fault for not even giving them a chance. There are a lot more examples, though.