Are you talking about the female Krogan? Because if so: hot.
I still get giddy every year. I love PAX, I love GDC, and I love E3. If I could’ve seen where we are now back when I was in high school I would’ve wet myself.
Even a spectacular failure is spectacular. For all your jaded, “It’s all the same shit,” you’ll be buying it come Christmas, or you’ll have given up posting on this board.
Come into the future, True Believers!
I’d kill for more sequels. Can they release a new STALKER game every Christmas?
When you say that E3 sucks, are you talking about the press briefings given over the past couple days, or the show itself?
+1
Almost everything gets announced around E3 anymore anyway. Besides, E3 is really just a trade show for retailers (much like the CES, from which it spawned) that also invites the enthusiast press. So a decline in “public information” is not a surprise.
Krogan:You don’t know me.
Shephard: But I would like to.
Aw yiss.
Ah, anyone who listened to last night’s bombcast will know that it’s not as simple as this.
John Blow(creator of Braid) who’s probably indie dev star #1 voiced unending bureaucratic frustration with the 2 microsoft gentlemen who were present and I have a strong feeling that the conversation would’ve escalated if Ryan Davis hadn’t intervened.
And that’s John Blow. Imagine what other developers face. Imagine how many potential John Blows have turned away and have given up. And I’d be willing to bet any amount of cash that Indie games face far more red tape than XBLA games.
I think Foxstab is right on the money.
Can I sell you popcorn?
I’m kinda glad I didn’t go. It’s been one yawnfest after another watching Twitter. Oh yay, the same retreaded bullshit over and over again. Ugh.
Is it the same popcorn they’ve been buying for the past ten years?
I agree to a point, but there’s some truth to the complaint. With the exploding budgets of today’s games, its very difficult to innovate when you risk so much money if the experiment doesn’t pan out. Safer to stick with yet another Call of Duty or whatever.
It’s just the naked commercialism of franchise-based gaming that pisses me off. All the big money is being spent on the same old, same old, because it’s a safe way to earn that money back (and make a huge profit).
I’m glad Indie devs now have the tools and ability to make quality games because it looks more and more like that’s where my interests lie, to go along with the one or two sequels I can stand (eg Diablo 3, BF3’s multiplayer).
That’s a fantastic point directly contrary to your argument. Ultimas way back when weren’t just evolutionary iterations on the same theme, each release was in itself a revolution.
Ultima4 was the first RPG without a big bad foozle, where winning was tied to becoming a better person. Ultima5 had NPC schedules tied to time of day. Ultima6 moved to a single scale, with colorful, attractive, and detailed (for the time) VGA tiled graphics, character portraits, and for the first time, an isometric view. It introduced interactivity; you could bake bread.
Ultima7 had outstanding gorgeous graphics that while very low-resolution don’t look totally anachronistic today, moving away from large tiles to tiny ones that fitted together seamlessly in the world. It was even in pseudo-3D; you could stack objects to get up in the Z axis. It revolutionized gameplay also, being the first fully mouse-driven game, and was fully real-time, not turn-based. It introduced dialogue trees for the very first time. You could not only bake bread but forge weapons, harvest honey from beehives, play the harpsichord, etc.
Technology moved quick in those days. You might upgrade from a 486SX/25 to a pentium-90, quadrupling your performance. And then to a P2-233 with a 3dfx graphics card, increasing performance by dozens of times. Remember GLquake? Remember playing quakeworld deathmatch online? Tech moved fast, innovation stretched to make use of these new capabilities, and PC gaming wasn’t tied to console generations for 7-8 years at a stretch.
It’s not just rose-colored glasses. Those days really were more exciting. They moved faster. It was awesome.
Sequels are okay as long as they’re the sequels I like, amirite.
Something that shows the extreme commercialism and conservationism of the industry is the focus on shooters. I mean, there were always popular genres in videogaming but goddammit the last two years are being dominated by shooters in a way it never happened before.
From MW3 to BF3, to Arma 3 or Prey 2, to Mass Effect 3 or Rage, to Resistance 3 or Deus Ex 3 or Bioshock Infinite or Metro 2034, Gears of War 3, Halo 4, Far Cry 3, etc etc etc.
I just named 13 future shooters or almost-shooters!
And yet there’s tons of innovation out there. Gears of War is a huge major this-gen franchise, and it wasn’t like any other game before it. Mass Effect is a huge major this-gen franchise, and it’s set in an original game setting and uses game mechanics never before seen in an RPG. Dragonage is a huge major this-gen franchise, and it’s set in an original setting and gives a depth of choice never seen in any game not called Torment. Bioshock is a huge major this-gen franchise, and it’s set in an original setting and innovates reasonably on the shooter formula. Braid and Portal are nothing but raw innovation. Fable II may be a sequel, but it was loaded with innovation. Crackdown was new and innovative and brilliant. Oblivion is the closest thing to a world-sim in an RPG that the 3D era has seen. Assassin’s Creed is all new IP and also plays like nothing that came before it.
And yes, there’s an AC2 and a Bioshock 2 and a Portal 2 and a Fable III and a Mass Effect 3 and a Dragonage 2 and a Gears of War 3. If you’re going to demand that nobody produce any sequels at all to immensely popular, highly-innovative games, you’re setting up an insane standard. And it hurts you even more that most of these sequels continue to innovate and evolve over their predecessor. AC2 is vastly better than AC1; Fable III… okay, it failed, but it wasn’t just Fable II all over again; Mass Effect and Dragonage famously changed way too much from their original installments; Gears 2 is a much richer game than Gears 1, with its ultra-popular Horde mode as an innovation.
Plus, there are all the original/innovative games that didn’t really succeed - Alan Wake, Prototype, Kameo, Banjo-Kazooie, Endwar.
I just don’t think it makes any sense at all to claim that there’s no more innovation in the industry. It makes a nice soundbite, but it flies in the face of all the actual evidence to the contrary.
No, E3 Died when it left Atlanta and moved to jaded and tired LA.
Stop buying them and maybe we’ll get something different.
Yeah yea, i am part of the problem. :p
I also buy games from other genres. Promise!
That’s because there was more low-hanging fruit. If your trees were green circles, then it was pretty easy to see where to go next (tree-shaped trees!). If you have four colors, it’s easy to see where to go next (16 colors!). If you only have 360KB of data to store all your conversations in, it’s easy to see what you do when you get 20MB (more conversations!).
Once you’re at a point where you have nearly-unlimited technical resources, it’s not so clear where you go next. You need to evolve new gameplay mechanisms even when there’s no hardware revolution allowing new possibilities that you had dreamt of years before but just couldn’t implement.