Quaro
2975
http://www.zenofdesign.com/perversely-the-target-gta-v-kerfuffle-represents-progress/
What is lost in all of the discussion is how this is actually a step forwards for games censorship in Australia. You see, for more than a decade, Australia has had one of the most repressive gauntlets of government game censorship in the world. This has been one of the most ridiculous parts of making games in the industry for quite some time.
A decent article on Darklands as ‘the best crpg’. The comments are worth a read too. I think while i agree on much of the games assessment, it still remains one of the hardest to ‘get’ crpg’s i have played. From the GUI issues to just how the game world actually works. It was not a game i found easy to power game, not as off the last version with all the patches.
I would love to see more modern games try to do what Darklands did, but i think the era of thoughtful and deep games is pretty much behind us as they just don’t make as much money as is required perhaps?
Razgon
2977
While many triple-A budget games certainly aren’t deep, there are plenty of deep games out there. Paradox releases a lot of them actually. Early access games like Lords of Xulima is also rather deep and hard. Wasteland is pretty damn deep as well, and the upcoming rpgs are also looking to be old-style deep and hard.
They are out there, if you want them.
Oh yeah AA/Kickstarters/Indies are pretty much all i pay to play these days.
I am going to be very, very sad if Pillars of Eternity doesn’t live up to my expectations.
Then again, if it hits about 60% it’ll probably be consensus Game of the Year ;)
I love Darklands, but I love it the way the parent loves their troubled child. Think only about the good times and forget the bad, they say as they bail Billy out for the tenth time.
Not only was it unplayable at launch because of bugs - and remember, this was at a time when 85% of gamers had no way to patch a game - but a lot of it frankly wasn’t well thought through. Interesting features were buried away where you’d almost never see them; game loops you had to repeat early and often were often tedious and off-putting but included for “realism,” as if that were justification enough.
Take the opening. It’s the worst in any major CRPG I can think of. To get enough resources to get your team equipped, the (non-cheaty) way is to repeat what is essentially the same dock fight over and over and over. Only then can you go to other areas, and only then do you get some sense of the vast scope of what the game has to offer. By that time you’re bored stiff by repeating the same content again and again.
There are lots of good things about Darklands, ideas that other games should steal (and have, like Mount and Blade and Banner Saga.) But no one should be trying to “make another Darklands.” They should be trying to make the game Darklands wanted to be, but wasn’t. Those who forget the past, etc.
Peter Moore isn’t a newbie in dealing with shitheels on social media. I imagine he’s dealt with a lot them throughout his career. Threats and cursing are old hat to him. Recently, someone on Twitter took to threatening his family, calling for his wife to be raped, etc.
“Hope your wife gets raped by Muslims. You’ve ruined FIFA your a disgrace.”
“Hope ur wife dies in a ditch a ditch u scum. Hurry up and die u old prick.”
“Hope your wife gets raped.”
“u scum I hate you and everything related to u … I hope u ur wife kids family all die then there’s nothing left of u.”
He reported the messages to Twitter.
The unsurprising result:
Ouch. I supposed the unsurprising result would be they got instabanned or something like that…
What was it? Link takes me to a twitter log in page. I don’t have a twitter account, so I can’t log in.
A response from Twitter saying that they investigated the complaint and found that the behavior wasn’t against the rules. Serious wtf there.
It seems Twitter rules don’t allow for direct threats. Because it said “I hope that you die!” etc, it isn’t a direct threat. Yeah, you can facepalm now.
Yeah, I agree this is “unsurprising”. Twitter’s idea of abuse doesn’t seem any more strict that my limited understanding of what’s illegal. You can be as vile as you want, wishing unspeakable acts on a user’s family, but if you’re not directly threatening to do something yourself, Twitter doesn’t make it their problem. Cynically, I get that, but I think most of us wish they’d do more.
Oddly enough, I wish (heh) we as a society did more about that kind of behavior and less about direct but idle threats. It always bothered me that you can be vile as you want but as soon as you cross an imaginary line, your life is over.
Arbitrary discontinuities in punishment always get me.
Scotten
2988
Thanks for another good reason for me to stay off Twitter.
On the good journalism side, we have this:
White says THQ had entered into so many long-term deals with companies like Pixar and Nickelodeon that even when THQ was losing money on those titles, it still had to pay licensing fees. Many of the deals also came with contractual obligations to produce a set number of games a year, which meant THQ was stuck developing games its executives knew would not sell.
“We really made some questionable business deals,” says one former THQ manager who asked to not be named. “Near the end, we were still getting screwed for Nickelodeon games, which we hadn’t worked on in years. We still owed a ton of money.”
Hahahah holy shit
World of Warcraft was the biggest MMO at the time. It had more than 10 million players who paid a monthly fee to play. Farrell believed if THQ could replicate some of that success, it would be financially set for years to come. Execs at the time said they wouldn’t need 10 million players. A fraction of that would be profitable. THQ just had to convince a million or so people to pay them every month for an indefinite period of time.
That’s what every publisher ever said in those years, and all failed. “They are doing tons of money with WoW, let’s make our own MMO! I know that surely we won’t get 10 million subs but even if we only get 1 million we will have a nice profit!”
Not understanding how hard is to get 1 million subs and how expensive are mmos to produce (and how long the development time, so much that if you tried to make a super pulished mmo like WoW, it would be released when the mmo craze was over, ironically). Just because it’s a 10% of WoW amount doesn’t mean it’s a low number.
Also pretty much all MMO fans were playing WoW, and without a clone you just didn’t have much time for other games/stuff in life.
LMN8R
2992
The biggest MMO before WoW was Everquest with what, 300,000 subscribers? How on earth can anyone being paid obscene amounts of money think they can magically triple the numbers of the biggest MMO outside of WoW?
EQ isn’t the biggest MMO outside WOW, and 300,000 users wasn’t the non-WOW MMO high water mark at the time the quote was made (2009). Plenty of MMOs have had more than 300,000 players at one time or another. EVE Online said last year it has 500,000 active accounts, for example, and its been around for a decade. (This is not the same as distinct users, mind you, but it doesn’t matter to the publisher’s bottom line.) Age of Conan sold 1.2 million copies its first year; Warhammer Online had about 800,000 players at the end of its first month.
It’s still a pretty brash statement. THQ had no MMO experience and no idea what making one entailed. And the MMO market at the time was completely saturated, including industry heavyweight EA having another Warhammer MMO while prepping Star Wars at the same time. But the one million number was not impossible - just extremely unlikely.
LMN8R was speaking in the past tense, and was correct at least for big-budget subscription-based MMOs.
