Next Gen Consoles

[EnderAndrew]

I actually really want to buy Eternal Darkness. It's one of the few third party games that is a Gamecube exclusive, and it's a mature title to boot.

 

Metroid Prime I've played in kiosks and I'm just not grabbed by the game. I really prefer games like System Shock, Deus Ex, Ghost Recon, or Half Life 2 as far as shooters go.

 

Viewtiful Joe also doesn't grab me.

 

I will eventually cave in a fork over $20 for Wind Waker. It is Zelda afterall. I played it in a kiosk, and the animation is incredible in how a 3d world can so fluidly look like 2d cell animation.

 

However, playing as a 5 year old elf is a big turn off. The visual style is a big turn off. I've been told there is a companion named Tinkle, or something, and it's rather annoying the whole game.

 

Add to that the sailing portions are supposed to be boring, and it's a pain to explore.

 

The dungeons are supposed to be good, but I've never seen a Zelda with so many complaints. If it wasn't a Zelda, I wonder if the game would be nearly as successful.

[Darque]

Eternal Darkness is beyond awesome.

 

Buy it.

 

Now.

[Child of Flame]

I actually really want to buy Eternal Darkness.  It's one of the few third party games that is a Gamecube exclusive, and it's a mature title to boot.

 

Metroid Prime I've played in kiosks and I'm just not grabbed by the game.  I really prefer games like System Shock, Deus Ex, Ghost Recon, or Half Life 2 as far as shooters go.

 

Viewtiful Joe also doesn't grab me.

 

I will eventually cave in a fork over $20 for Wind Waker.  It is Zelda afterall.  I played it in a kiosk, and the animation is incredible in how a 3d world can so fluidly look like 2d cell animation.

 

However, playing as a 5 year old elf is a big turn off.  The visual style is a big turn off.  I've been told there is a companion named Tinkle, or something, and it's rather annoying the whole game.

 

Add to that the sailing portions are supposed to be boring, and it's a pain to explore.

 

The dungeons are supposed to be good, but I've never seen a Zelda with so many complaints.  If it wasn't a Zelda, I wonder if the game would be nearly as successful.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

I think it's because it was Zelda that it go so many complaints, it is different from any other Zelda title, so it got complaints.

 

It probably wouldn't have sold as well, but what game does?

 

The visual style was a turn off until I saw how well it worked. One of the things I noticed, that I thought to myself 'that wouldn't have worked so well if they had a more traditional style of presentation' was the way the nod you in the right direction when you get stuck. Link's eyes look toward whatever you need to use or wherever you need to be. This can be a help when there's a branch that's out of your line of sight you need to grapple, etc. But it's subtle enough that it's really not that noticable, and if his eyes were not in the cartoony style, you would not notice it at all.

 

Tingle is this weird little dude you rescue from a jail cell in one of the first islands you visit. He gives you an item called the 'Tingle Tuner' that allows you to hookup a GBA to the Cube using the cable, and have someone else play as Tingle, from everything I understand, this is more of a help system for younger children playing the game, so their parents can help them out as Tingle, it is not needed to complete the game by any stretch of the imagination. Other than that, your only real interaction with Tingle is when you need to pay for the Chart he sends you in the Mail to find the Triforce Charts, or paying him to translate the Triforce Charts when you find them because they're written in Hyrulian and this game takes place in another 'Kingdom'.

 

The sailing parts aren't nearly as bad as I expected them to be. Especially when you get the power to harness the power of the Cyclones and 'warp' from place to place. This shortens up travel a lot, but I kind of liked the sailing parts in the first place once I tried them.

 

And the Dungeons are really good. The co-op ones were especially awesome.

[EnderAndrew]

People say that fans were just upset because of change.

 

Zelda 2 was completely different from 1, and I really liked it.

 

Zelda 3 offered the mirror world, tons of new items, magic spells, and changed gameplay.

 

Link's Awakening on the Gameboy was quite different, and didn't even feature Hyrule or Zelda.

 

Zelda: OOT jumped to 3D and people loved how the series changed greatly.

 

Major's Mask again completely changed gameplay with the time element, and the masks. No one greatly complained.

 

All the Zelda titles have changed. Only one title alienated most of the fans and got all these complaints.

 

Twilight Princess features Link turning into a wolf while a monkey rides you. People are open to that, so I think Zelda fans are fairly open and optimistic that Zelda titles will automatically be good.

 

Ask most people, and they will tell you the game they are most excited about is Twilight Princess, as we know nothing about it.

[ShadowPaladin V1.0]

Yep chalk up another positive opinion of Eternal Darkness.

 

Wind Waker is excellent. Only thing I never liked about it was the travel across that open ocean.Although because I like to explore it wasnt a gamebreaker. Gets better though later in the game. The whole "cutsey" thing really never bothered me. It's quite possible to have a cutesy game on the surface with deep involving gameplay.

 

Really need to finish it one day. I'm in the forest temple if I recall.

 

Twilight Princess is definately my gamecube pick though. It's almost the opposite of windwaker. Link gets older , the whole thing is dark and brooding and er some other things....

[Darth Flatus]

from the clips i've seen of Twilight princess it looks like a very pretty version of ocarina with shiny bits.

[ShadowPaladin V1.0]

Thats quite a common impression. Certainly nothing wrong with it.

[Darth Flatus]

yes i think thats a good thing, i enjoyed seeing enemies and landscapes of old being updated :D :D it might be my reason to buy a gamecube. especially see as it will be dirt cheap by the time it is released.

[metadigital]

http://spore.ea.com/

 

The art in the game is dynamically created as you go along.

 

Exactly what's so exciting about next-gen games. Less artists, more programmers :D

 

Kidding. The reality, though, is that procedural graphics is *likely* the way of the future in terms of large-scale games. I don't mean the death of personalized graphics - far from it. You'll still have your hand-crafted NPC's with unique skins/models, your uniquely stylish weapons, whatever. The difference, though, is that the *art* itself will be easier to produce. No more artists spending weeks perfecting a temple that's only "up to par". Imagine, instead, the ability to translate your idea of the scene into the computer in 1/5th - 1/10th of the time, which leaves room for both better details and more (longer?) gameplay. It's happening with animation. It will happen with games.

 

Not that I've anything against slow-and-steady handcrafted art. It's just that, in today's consumers' eyes, the baseline of a game is having "decent" graphics. The bar will only rise with time, and we can imagine that in order to produce a game in the coming decades, you would either need to hire teams of hundreds of artists (thus making mass appeal and corporate dominance even *more* prevalent, not to mention the management ability to distribute work over such a large crowd), or discover new technology that would allow you to create better art at ten times the speed through a combination of procedural modification of previous or base models. and better production architecture

 

Personally, I'm thinking the latter will come true sooner than the former.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Actually, I would say that both initiatives will happen / are happening simultaneously.

 

I think we are in a period comparable to the Italian Renaissance and the crafts, like stomemasonry, with our modern games as the cathedrals. We don't have enough stonemasons in the world today to build Saint Peter's Basilica in a century; I think we will see more and more artists and even programmers playing a bigger part -- or rather more people playing smaller but more frequent parts of the entire industry, as work practices become more disjointed from careers to job-specific contracts.

[EnderAndrew]

Something has to give.

 

Consumers are complaining about the price of games, yet the cost to make games has gone up tremendously. A console title might cost on average $5 million to produce. Halo and GTA will turn huge profits, while many titles might lose money in a serious way.

 

Despite $5 million dollar budgets, there still isn't enough money to properly pay the development staff, and now voice actors are screaming for a portion of the pie.

 

Some development houses are in constant crunch, of 60-70 hour weeks with no paid overtime.

 

As graphics increase, the need for more detailed models, and tons of them increases. More and more games are using full voice recordings for every line of dialogue. Companies are now paying for major soundtracks to their games, etc.

 

Something has to give.

[metadigital]

Something has to give.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Indeed.

 

Economics suggests that supply and demand will deform the market like this:

1. Lots of artists and developers (and testers) working for less to get started. (Can anyone say "relocate to India, China or Romania"? India is producing something like 2000 English speaking IT graduates every week, or some ridiculous number.)

 

2. More and better content requires more of the above, with less overheads. The contract market has demonstrated a useful way for big multi-nationals to off-load career-linked employee capital investments as a smalled overall expense for more productive content. The "off-loaded" employees (contractors) are then responsible for superannuation, training, travel, dental, whatever ... the corporates don't even need to pay severance.

 

Result: Bigger, better products. More, higher skilled workers getting paid less for more productive work practices and better output. Developers, artists, actors, testers, etc are "commodified" (I actually had a manager say this to me, in my role as a contractor, a while back) and therefore replacable cogs in the machinery. I.e they get screwed.

 

But we get better games.

[EnderAndrew]

I think we are definately on that track currently, but at some point we will get diminishing returns in a super-competitive market, and people will get tired of taking losses, or working for nothing.

 

At that time either the industry will recede, or an innovation will allow a great ammount of work to be done far more efficiently.

 

Games like Spore allow for lengthy, dynamic gameplay where the content is largely user-created. Not everyone digs Sandbox games, but I'm sure some of the concepts of Sandbox games can be applied to other genres.

[Azarkon]

I've always seen the essence of games being a hobbyist's enterprise. The modern trend of mass entertainment may saturate the market, but my own interests lie more with the fringe games, the community of mod-makers, and the indie innovators/enthusiasts. I hate to say something like "the good old days" with respect to the time when people who made games did it for the love of the game, so I won't. Instead, I'll point out that the equivalent of those old small-scale game developers (sometimes as few as a company of one) today is the mod community. They share the passion of the greatest game developers out there (albeit lacking in experience), with none of the corporate and economic fetters.

 

Sure, they ain't gonna produce you a polished, casual, user-friendly, and bug-free game, but that's only really a problem for the average joes who look to gaming as just another way to relax for an hour after a day's work. For the more serious hobbyists, who thrived in the days when games were scarce, difficult to install, and even more difficult to actually play, they're often the only source of true excitement (aside from a few notable companies who strive to make great games despite the odds). And it is in this area that I place my hopes for the future of gaming - that companies would embrace the idea of modding (some already do, thankfully) and release their game for the masses, but their tools for the enthusiasts.

 

Technology will inevitably improve the tools of the trade, so as long as gaming exists as a hobby, true innovation will not die. Perhaps the days of the single-man developer has passed, but the days of the single-man mod creator is yet to come (or here, if you prefer).

[metadigital]

True, I agree.

 

And one result of the reduced cost of constituent labour is that hobbyists will have better quality available for their use. After all, if you get paid almost nothing, you may as well release shareware and -- if it's good -- become an overnight sensation, instead.

 

[EnderAndrew]

Spiderweb Software by Jeff Vogel is a good example.

[Musopticon?]

Vogel is a genius. I've never been so satisfied with an rpg before. No bugs, no bogus, creativity and huge amount of statistics.

[EnderAndrew]

I've loved Vogel since he formed the Scorched Earth Political Party many years back.

 

I also bought his book on parenting. It's a great read.

[Musopticon?]

You know him? It's a small world.

[EnderAndrew]

I don't know him personally, but I used to frequent his web site, and I check out all his games.

[Musopticon?]

Oh, it seems I misread. Yeah, I've been sort of a fan since playing NetherGate back in -99. Nevr got around to try the Exile-games, but everything else(mostly) has been really enjoyable. Especially considering how small his "team" is.

[ShadowPaladin V1.0]

People have complained about prices for as long as I can remember. It's only the growth of the internet that means you see it more often.

 

If you cant adjust the cost per unit, then the only solution is to sell more units.

[Darth Flatus]

In real terms (in the UK) the price of consoles and games has decreased over the last 15 years.

[Guest Fishboot]

I also bought his book on parenting.  It's a great read.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Hah - yeah, I remember being linked to Vogel's parenting essay site and spending several days reading and thinking that the guy was a genius... then I found his link to the Spiderweb Software page and realized that it was the same guy that I had considered a genius for making Geneforge 1 and 2 (personal favorites) nearly solo. So I had independently come to the conclusion that the guy was a genius twice.

[metadigital]

I've loved Vogel since he formed the Scorched Earth Political Party many years back.

 

I also bought his book on parenting.  It's a great read.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I feel deprived: I've never encountered Spiderweb software, have you got a link?

[Musopticon?]

http://www.spidweb.com/