Isn’t UFO:ET moddable? It may just end up the next X-com in a few months.
That’s true it is moddable, but I did a little poking around in the code, and hunting on the forums backs my fears that modding the graphics and maps may be a bigger challange!
In a lot of ways Ufo Alien Invasion (http://ufo.myexp.de/?id=downloads) is a lot futher along in overall design. Its pretty much a straight port of X-Com design…sadly without my coveted third faction that UFO: ET was supposed to have, but the game is a very polsihed for its stage of development, a looker, its pretty solid, and its free! :)
Yeah, I’m actually playing quite a bit of UFO:ET with BMan’s Mod installed - it’s definitely the closest thing to X-COM I’ve played in years… which is really a bit sad. And while the mods are great, they’re going to run into the limits of the engine sooner rather than later, and that’s where the fun stops.
I tried out UFO: AI a while back and couldn’t really figure out the interface. Things as simple as equipping a squad and dispatching it to a crash site are nightmarishly difficult. I know it’s an open-source fan-made thing, so I can’t really complain, but dammit people, how hard is it to make a paper doll loading screen or make it so that when I click on a crashed UFO it asks if I want to send a ship there? [Edit] I just tried it again, and either they made some big changes since last time on the interface or it has some crazy problems running on Vista. Either way, there’s still no deformable terrain as far as I could tell. In rocket launcher vs farmhouse, it’s farmhouse 1, rocket launcher 0 [/edit]
This is why we desperately need a professional-quality game with a polished UI and at least a platform for modders to create attractive graphics.
Greetings:
Good lord, you mean someone actually reads that thing? Damn, now I feel guilty for not writing anything for it in the last year or so…
To your point, though (and to Dan’s later down), I don’t think you can use Civ or C&C as an example (actively-supported franchises done by the same people), BG series for the same reason. Pirates, again, is a special case because it was done by Sid & co., so not only is there the Firaxis brand loyalty, but it’s also seen as “authentic”; similarly for Chris Taylor and Supreme Commander.
The question wasn’t whether the Gollop brothers could do X-Com 2, but why someone else hasn’t made it yet and what it would take for that to happen successfully. I also don’t think that you can use RTS as a generic example, because while they share tons of aspects, there are always unique and differentiating features, and nothing springs to mind that’s been a straight “been there, done that” RTS that wasn’t a part of an existing franchise and has seen significant success. Plus, RTS is a demonstrably viable market space (several successful titles in the last couple of years).
A better comparison would be Fallout 3, but we haven’t seen how that’s going to play out yet. Probably the best comparison if you wanted to make this argument would be Prince of Persia, which went from 2D to 3D, PC to console, changed developers, etc., and they went out of their way to get Mechner involved, at least in Sands of Time. Even at that, PoP has been successful, but not as much as some similar combat/platforming games, which goes back to why spending money on reviving this franchise makes more sense than spending the money on something we have hard evidence people will buy now.
My understanding is that the Total War series has built slowly over time from the modest success of Shogun up through the present; you can’t throw in Rome all of a sudden without taking into account the way they’ve built audience over the last several years. Silent Storm, again, while decently successful with critcs, hasn’t exactly been a commercial blockbuster.
Not to sound like a broken record, but the argument has to be more than “you can make a profit on this”, it has to be “you will make more money doing this game than you would making a different game”. What qualifies as enough money can also vary from publisher to publisher. Some publishers want to see 2-3X investment to justify a project. It’s a very, very steep hill to climb. Note: I’m not saying I don’t want it to be climbed; I’m just explaining why it’s not as simple as it may appear at first.
You really think so? You don’t think people would wait, cautiously, to see what the reviews said? You don’t think they’ve been burned by inferior clones and supposed spiritual successors?
Okay, so you’ve kind of tilted the table anyway with that whole “critics hailed as the legitimate successor” bit, but keep in mind that this is, in itself, a huge mountain to overcome. You’re not just saying “Why doesn’t someone set out to make this”, you’re now pushing it as far as “Why don’t they set out to make this and achieve the holy grail of capturing it entire and making jaded, cynical gamers fall in love all over again”. Getting to the level of quality where critics universally praise a game is damn, amazingly, incredibly, astonishingly hard.
Even with the best IP, crack developers, and huge budgets, it’s still mind-bogglingly difficult. How many games get there each year? 2? 5? Execution ain’t easy. There are tons of people out there with great ideas about games, but extremely few studios are ever able to reach this level. You’re certainly not going to be able to guarantee hitting this level of success, and there’s no way you’re doing it on a minimal budget.
I love how all of these conversations start out as “just make the same game with new graphics” and inevitably end up with “oh, and add this one feature; wait, one more; and I almost forgot this other one”. Going back to the budget, don’t forget to add in design, prototyping, iteration, tuning, balance, and polish time for all of these new features. I think I already mentioned the expenses for all those flashy effects to impress the kids in your demo reel.
See, this is part of the problem. Not only does the budget quickly go from “minimal” to “massive”, you also have the problem of what you change. The audience doesn’t even agree, so no matter what you do, you’re going to piss off some of the people for doing it or for not doing the other thing, and there goes your shot at universal acclaim. Or you do it as a letter-perfect re-creation and you get slammed for not innovating.
It’s the “No Mutants Allowed” effect. You try to make the interface easier to use, and someone claims it’s dumbed-down; you try to ease the learning curve and someone claims it’s lost the tension; you tweak the units and someone claims you’ve ruined the balance; it doesn’t matter what you do, someone’s going to say you got it wrong. That’s part of why people don’t mess with some of these titles. Your fanatics are not an asset, they’re a burden. Unless you win them over, they’re going to slam you constantly, loudly, and repeatedly - even if the game is actually better for the changes - because it’s different from what their fantasy experience is in their heads.
Look, I’m not saying this is the way it should be, I’m saying this is how it is. The question was “this seems like an obvious road to success, why is no one taking it?” The answer is that it’s a lot tougher road with a lot more land-mines spread over it than it may at first glance appear. It’s really freaking hard to get a publisher to fork over 12 million bucks (and if you’re talking PC/360/PS3, don’t think you’re getting it for less than that). Getting them to do that for a franchise that’s already defined as a niche game and doesn’t match with any of the recently successful gaming trends is well-nigh impossible.
I hope someone manages to do it as much as the next guy, but I understand why it’s a tough sell.
Best,
Michael.
Don’t think I’m bagging on you, Michael - I appreciate the frank answers from your perspective. That’s the whole point of my asking in the first place.
Does it really cost eight digits to put out a turn-based game these days? Holy crap… I just had the idea of a smaller budget in my mind because all the stuff I’d want in an X-COM clone would be easily doable with “last-gen” technology. It wouldn’t need to be a DX10 game or anything crazy like that… hell, if it looked as good as Titan Quest did a year+ ago, I’d be thrilled.
I really don’t think it would be too hard to recapture what made X-COM glorious. I know that sounds arrogant, but I honestly think the only reason it hasn’t been done yet is that no one has really tried. UFO: ET comes close enough to taste it, even though it’s built on what feels like eight-year-old tech and was probably developed for a song. I mean, how hard would it be to make a straight-up, 100% clone of the original? It doesn’t strike me (from my incredibly ignorant perspective) as technically difficult, considering the game was made by a handful of programmers and one or two artists. The design is all there to be taken, basically verbatim.
Then, once you’ve got that, come the changes that I would make: More content, like weapons, equipment, armor, ships, aliens, etc; balance tweaks (the end game was all messed up with the super psi soldiers and massive laser rifle manufacturing bases); and more features, like multiplayer. Like I said, I want a game that stands on the shoulders of giants.
And the best way to get around the fanatics constantly bitching and moaning about each and every little change, in my opinion, is to make the game as moddable as possible. If they don’t like it, they can easily change it.
As for the profitability, isn’t there still a pretty huge market for turn-based games in Europe? I keep hearing that that kind of thing sells like magic brownies over there. And the fact that they keep making these low quality ones says to me there’s some money to be made there, especially if you put out one game that stands head and shoulders above the rest.
You mean aside from the 4-5 products that tried to recapture the glory already, right? (Including, but certainly not glossing over, everything from TFTD on.)
I’m in Fitch’s camp here. I think most of what makes this game so great is the nostalgia at this point. God knows it’s a brutal, unforgiving game that has a horrible learning curve and starting strategy of “Keep whoever lives through more than your first 3 missions, because at that point they’re the only shot you have. Use the rest to chuck grenades and hope you don’t lose the good guys until you can research power armor/lasers.”
I’m not saying X-Com is a bad game, but I think it’s a very primitive game in a lot of ways for today’s audience. Hell, compare Civ IV to the original and tell me it’s not a vastly improved (and substantially different) game. I think to remake X-Com successfully you need to go the “spiritual successor” route, and I think that makes your above statement far more dubious, because empirical evidence shows that what X-Com had was apparently a mystical je ne sais quois that just made it “work” for people.
(Now a game in the vein of X-Com but not really involving aliens and the like might work better, but haven’t multiple turn based squad level strategy games come and gone over time without scratching that X-Com itch for folks? I think part of that reason is because the base idea of X-Com resonated so well.)
I think you’re basically asking why folks can’t re-create the magic of the original Wizardry or the original Bard’s Tale, and the answer is while a lot of folks really favorably remember all those games, they had a lot going for them simply because they were new and trod virgin ground. And re-creating that, by definition, is impossible.
Riffing off the primative game bit, this could be the experience that made it fun. Unfortunately, concept games, especially concept games whose concept is this sort of brutal punishment just doesn’t resonate with the audience in the age of balance. I mean look at how many people think level scaling was a good design decision in Oblivion. ;)
Oh, I definitely think that’s why a lot of folks here like it. It harkens back to an older age in gaming where stuff was HARD and the reward for figuring stuff out wasn’t cut scenes or hidden goofy things but simply getting to see the rest of the game. I’m sure that really works for a ton of the crusty old hardcore gamer types who frequent these boards, and care enough about PC games to vote on “Top 10 games of all time!” lists.
I just don’t think it represents a large chunk of audience in general. And even some of us who fit the demographics for “Crusty old hardcore gamer.” have converted. I don’t have time to bang my head against a game until I finally get the random number generator to favor me. I don’t find that rewarding or fun. It annoys the piss out of me that whether or not half my squad dies in a fight when I step off the plane (in a landing zone I can’t control) depends on whether or not the aliens have randomly been set up to have a clear line of sight into the plane. Who the fuck thinks that’s good gameplay, to totally fuck over the player in ways they have zero control over?
But I guarantee you 20 people, minimum, who read the above paragraph will mentally “Sheesh” me and declare that I just don’t get the appeal of the game.
Greetings:
Okay, one more round. I can stop any time. Really.
It doesn’t have to. I don’t think GalCiv cost that much; I seem to remember Brad saying something to that effect.
The problem is, you can’t have it both ways; either you do it the cheap way and you don’t compete with the top-line titles in the retail space, or you try to compete and you have to pay the money.
From our previous exchanges, licensing an engine can easily run you half a million; doing 3D tilesets could easily take a million or two; porting it to Xbox360, there’s another million or two. A million here, a million there, before you know it, you’re talking about real money.
You don’t think anyone has really tried? You think that all those clones were half-hearted attempts by people who didn’t really care? Come on.
Say it with me, execution is hard. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was a tremendously derivative game. It took the tried-and-true pieces of war shooters and put it all together with an incredible polish, and it did gangbusters. Given how well known all of this stuff is, how come EA’s never been able to put out a sequel that’s been as good? It’s not because they’re clueless; it’s not because they didn’t have an experienced team or a blockbuster budget. Why didn’t Sid ever finish that dinosaur came, why didn’t it come together? Why did Blizzard cancel Starcraft: Ghost three separate times? Because even when you know what you’re doing, making a great game is hard. It’s really, really, really freaking hard.
A great game takes a good idea, a good team, the right kind of production process, and an amazing amount of chemistry that brings everything together. Even if you know exactly what you’re doing and have a team that can individually do their jobs well, that still doesn’t mean you’re going to walk away with a great game; hell, even a good game is a major accomplishment - much more so, let me say, than people generally give credit for.
It’s like movies. You can have a great cast, a great script, a great director, and it still never comes together. Anyone can write a script; anyone can pick up a camera and take pictures; anyone can pretend to be someone they’re not. It takes a great team and some phenomenal chemistry to actually make a movie worth watching. Success in these kinds of creative endeavors is never guaranteed. The reason why the people who can do it 3 or 4 times are superstars is because it’s astonishing; like I said, most people in the industry don’t get there even once.
I understand that people outside the industry don’t necessarily get how hard it actually is. Consider that as journalists, when you go to a studio, everyone talks about the things that have gone right. They focus on the good ideas; they show the stuff that looks good; they paint a picture of the rosiest possible outcome, because they want you to walk away with a positive impression.
If you feel positive about the people, the studio, the game, you’re going to write a more positive preview and that matters (perhaps too much), so they’re never going to show you the crap, the prototypes that never worked, the endless debates between two valid but contradictory positions, the hopelessness of knowing that you’re over budget and over schedule and you’re never going to be able to deliver the game you thought you were making, or that the game you set out to make couldn’t be made, or that even if you did make it, it wouldn’t be fun.
They’re not going to tell you that the artists hate the coders because they’re ruining the art by forcing it into budgets that can’t deliver the experience the concept promised. They’re not going to tell you that the coders hate the artists because they check in broken assets that cause the game to crash. They’re not going to tell you that everyone hates the designer because they think he’s making bad choices about the game. They’re not going to tell you that the producer has ulcers and insomnia because all anyone ever does is bitch to him and fail to deliver what they promised in the time they promised it, and he knows he’s going to have to put everyone on crunch and they’re going to hate him for it.
Making games is work. It’s often hard work. Making good games is a tremendous amount of hard work with a fair amount of luck. Making great games is almost a fucking miracle. If you think that people aren’t making more great games because they’re not really trying, you don’t understand what it takes.
Sorry, I know that got a little heated towards the end there. I know you’re not bagging on me, or game developers in general. It’s just hard sometimes not to take it personally when people dismiss the difficulties you face as though they didn’t exist.
We’re partially responsible, because we don’t talk about a lot of this stuff openly. Even on projects that turn out really well, the stories of what went wrong along the way would curl your toes. There’s a reason, actually a lot of them, that the average lifespan of a game developer is less than five years.
Now, putting out a magazine that’s full of well-written, original, fresh content and exclusives on great, high-profile games, with groundbreaking investigative journalism and socially relevant commentary that remains entertaining, then putting it out every month on a reasonable budget, well that’s easy. (winky smiley goes here)
Best,
Michael.
mouselock, I disargee completely, rand down down the core features of X-Com, and no games today since has combine all those features. If they did…as I said I would shout up and buy the game. The game is not by any means a “primitive game”! If you want to argue that today’s general gaming audience would be daunted by so many features and depth of play…that you could argue. If you want to argue that the good developers don’t want to tackle with this because the evolution of the technology would make it doing all those featuers in one title a far more formidable project that it was 20 years ago I’ll buy that. I 'll accept that getting a entire development house to create done by difirent people than the orignal franchise has all kinds of hidden logistical and political complications as Michael implied.
I complete disagree with all that a re-hash or reboots have not been succesful. and I still hold Civ as a prime example it basically same with the evolution of features! And Total war’s forumula is almost exactly the same in each incarnation with mainly graphical improvements, new them and a few new features (they even recycled to a old theme in the last version). I’ll accept Michael comment for the time that re-hash and remakes have largely only succeeded with the original development group, as I can’t think of a remake right now that did great without the orignal creators. I’ve do some project management and I know it can take a lof of effort to get a group of 50-100 people all working cooperatively to a common goal.
Michael and others, I could accept the movie anology or the pointing to the clones and saying see its just a niche. However, till a game comes out the really captures all the features I spelled out in my post upthread, I’ll continue to rally that the clones were half hearted ones compared to the orignal. The didnt really look at the original and recreate it and ‘freshen’ up the theme (again all the culture of aliens for the last 20 years, books, movies, news, tv). Sure some of the clones created the detail just right in some or sometimes in a number of areas, but without fail other features of the orignal they skipped them outright, or glossed over it…most of them also choose to use themes that totally split off from the original’s formula.
Point is no on has recreated it…it’s not magic (though I think a great game requires love) the core features that made it a success anre no fuzzy non functional requiments, they are measurable…its just no one has had the determination to take it on. Why that really is…is the design scope to ambitous for most design teams? to expensive? are is the marketing crunchers steering clear because the game’s increasing old and the clones have desingated the design to niche status?.. or is there another reason?
I’m asking… pretty please, pretty please… don’t use the re-hash/remake aspect as your main arguement. One of my main functions now in Project Management is doing cost analysis and ROI research…and I’m already tempted to write a 5 page ppt with breakdown of every succesful remake and net sales for the past 20 years (where I can find the data) to win this point :)
I think I can swallow that making a great remake is very difficult if its not the same developers, but saying a re-makes doesn’t sell is absurd to me…and I cringe if the industry as a whole has that impression.
I’ll conceed that some remakes do fail for following to closey the orignal design…in nearly every case I can think of this was because the remake choose to stick so close to the orignal design where similar features in modern products had surpassed the remake. Dune 3 and a few others that come to mind suffered a little from this “retro backlash”. Why play a retro title when nwe games have better features. However, as I pointed out X-com was a game that used unique features that are only now starting to catch on (such as destructable enviros and modeling multi floor buildings inside and out on the same map, and combining detailed tactial and strategic layers). Nearly all the features and combination of features are still only seen pretty rarely (and usually on top selling or criticaly acclaimed titles)…and as I said never all together…even forgetting the theme of aliens
Just to throw down the gaunlet. I’m entirely ok with a developer taking whatever theme and current 'Hot genre setting" and releasing a game with all the above core features (feel free to skip my would like to sees :) . I’ll buy it, and heck Ill buy 5 more for christmas presents! Just allow the fans access to modding tools (or mod friendly) to change and tweak the “setting” and we’ll do the rest :)
You really think there’s a signficant number of potential customers who care about destructible environments and multi-story buildings? I find that hard to believe. Fire Emblem doesn’t have any of that, and it’s a perfectly fine tactical turn-based game as far as I am concerned.
Even if someone remade the game exactly with a modern engine, it wouldn’t be the same game. Everything that goes into a game contributes to the feel, from the graphics, the music, the interface, the pacing, etc. You can faithfully follow the design of an old game and not end up with the same experience.
As a game is being made you run into things as well. Maybe something has always bugged you about the game. Perhaps the team agrees a particular aspect isn’t fun. I mean, really. Was “x” really that much fun or more of an annoyance that everyone just got used to? So even going through the natural development cycle the “soul” of a game can change with these minor tweaks.
And of course, how many people really want to remake a game exactly? We already have the old game, why do the exact same thing again? It’s also not very fulfilling/challenging as a developer. You want to make something that will top the original, not clone it. Whether or not teams have succeeded in that goal is another issue entirely, but that is always the intention. It’s not like anyone goes out with the goal of making an inferior or bad game.
Even if you could make the same game over, you wouldn’t really want to. Then people will rail on it for being “too similar to the original”, “not innovative enough”, etc. Peoples taste in games change. Just as the world isn’t the same as it was in 1993 nobody is the same person with the same tastes they were when X-COM came out back then. Just as any other game released in '93 probably wouldn’t do so hot today, even a direct clone of X-COM would probably suffer from the same problems. Games have gotten much better since then, both graphically and design-wise. People’s expectations are much higher now than before. Both on the dev teams, the publishers who fund the projects and all the people who play the games.
You can say that rehash sequels sell well, but rehashes change gameplay aspects, just as X-COM clones have done. But those haven’t met with the same success as many other game series’ have. So you can’t say that they’re exactly the same game, just as X-COM remakes haven’t been exactly the same game, but rather tried to capture the spirit of the original game (in their own way) and bring it into the present day.
So I would say that I agree completely with Michael. It’s not a simple task just to “remake the game exactly with a new engine”. That’s not a realistic approach to developing a game. Things never work out that cleanly, just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
I think it’s more than just it’s hard, but the context in which it’s hard. You’re fighting off an alien force that’s vastly superior. That’s what I meant by a concept game, is it sticks to it’s concept in that way.
I just don’t think it represents a large chunk of audience in general. And even some of us who fit the demographics for “Crusty old hardcore gamer.” have converted. I don’t have time to bang my head against a game until I finally get the random number generator to favor me. I don’t find that rewarding or fun. It annoys the piss out of me that whether or not half my squad dies in a fight when I step off the plane (in a landing zone I can’t control) depends on whether or not the aliens have randomly been set up to have a clear line of sight into the plane. Who the fuck thinks that’s good gameplay, to totally fuck over the player in ways they have zero control over?
What would be be like for it to be ok to lose? Let’s say you’re given a map with a bunch of spotting a landing zones or sightings, let’s say 10. You only need to win 5 of those to move on to the next part of the game’s story.
The key is to let the player know, they won’t always win, but that’s ok, it’s part of the game.
But I guarantee you 20 people, minimum, who read the above paragraph will mentally “Sheesh” me and declare that I just don’t get the appeal of the game.
You’re probably right. I just have a hard time myself believing there’s no way to make a game fit its concept, be hard, and be playable. Though, whether its worth the effort monetarily for publishers is a different question, as Fitch and you pointed out.
I would love to see what people clamor for: the original XCom, unchanged except for much better graphics and perhaps nicer mouse interface and the bug fixes that the unofficial patches fixed. No other changes. And then see someone offer it for sell, say, online, perhaps $19. And see if it does indeed sell.
I’d certainly buy it, but I’d be interested to see how many others would.
Oh - and one thing they got and other designers back in those days got, that many seem to not understand today: the ability to allow users to personalize the game and thus develop a stronger emotional investment. By simply allowing you to rename your troops, in your mind’s eye that wasn’t Grunt Wollinski who was on point in the dark with “something” out there, it was Joe Roberts, your best friend in high school, or Liz Martin, the babe you had a crush on in college, etc. Falcon 3 was the first flight sim that did this, allowing you to not only rename the pilots but also put in custom pictures, and this simple interface feature provided a profound difference in how much the sim was now also a role playing game. Wish more developers these days understood something as simple as allowing users to “personalize” a game that way.
Jon Shafer Even if someone remade the game exactly with a modern engine, it wouldn’t be the same game. Everything that goes into a game contributes to the feel, from the graphics, the music, the interface, the pacing, etc. You can faithfully follow the design of an old game and not end up with the same experience."
I’m not sure I can think of a remake where a developer put all the same features, but the game fell flat becasuse the “feel” was diffirent. Logically, that does make a certain kind of sense, but I dont think it accounts for the market fully. For instance the mod community being a factor.
As a game is being made you run into things as well. Maybe something has always bugged you about the game. Perhaps the team agrees a particular aspect isn’t fun. I mean, really. Was “x” really that much fun or more of an annoyance that everyone just got used to? So even going through the natural development cycle the “soul” of a game can change with these minor tweaks.
From a delopment standpoint I can accept this, a team of 20-100 peole and there is too much temptation to put your own spin in on whats fun. Unless the whole development team has really A: Broken down and examined the high concept and features that X-Com brought to the table B: As a team agreed what that is. C: only change the features if the evolution of those features through modern title has passed the orignal design (in most cases X-com features still leads the pack in innovation, exept in tactical combat where the ability to open the door and a few minor other niggles have been outdone by modern titles)
Even if you could make the same game over, you wouldn’t really want to. Then people will rail on it for being “too similar to the original”, “not innovative enough”
This arguement applies IF the game’s features and theme have been done well repeateadly since and done better, looking at my feature list and definition of theme, its actually never been done again (unless you count TfTD, which was oddly enough outsourced within Microprose, which does give further weight that outsourcing tends to damage the core design). This features and themes are in fact ripe for picking now 20 years later.
Chris Nahr You really think there’s a signficant number of potential customers who care about destructible environments and multi-story buildings? I find that hard to believe. Fire Emblem doesn’t have any of that, and it’s a perfectly fine tactical turn-based game as far as I am concerned.
Those feature’s individually add a little to the depth or fun to any game. However what X-Com got right was that combining them…
[ul]
[li]RPG like characterics and devlopment of your squads. Done well in some of the clones
[/li][li]X-Com had mult level/floor combat something rarely seen at the time, and often passed over or glossed over in clones we’ve seen
[/li][li]X-Com modeled dynaimic maps where characters fought inside and outside buildings on the same map,
[/li][li]Completely destructable enviorments[/ul]To create something that was more than the sum of its parts…it allowed players to experince natural stories that unfolded during play
[/li]
Think back to all the forum chatter about the memorable moemnts in the game itself (not about the game) when people play/replay it. The tension of losing you cannon fodder squaddies and having to hunt with your few elite soilders the last few aliens…and they’re not in the street! A couple of sectoid snipers on the upper floor, no problem time to bring up the rocket launchers and level the building…oh wait there are some damn civies in there…damn that will hurt my mission end rating. A personal favorite… a civvy deciding its a wise idea to run through the middle of a shootout with your squad and some aliens (I still have that screenshot :) Somehow he managed to live…
All this talk about it made me want to load it back up which I did :)…thank god for Gametap…no messing with a DOS window or having to run some type of slow program!
If you haven’t already figured it out I’m a big fan of games that allow you to create your own involved story…rather than the ones the developers create for you…even posting your story about the game, and having it be a moment that just unfolded or you created is very fun and satisying to talk aobut…but that’s just aspect of the game I enjoyed
It’s kind of arrogant to think you have the magic sauce and the developers don’t. I’m not saying you have to unquestioningly agree with their design decision, but go out and do some market research to see how popular strategy games have been on the PC in the last 5 years. What were their features and settings? Who were they aimed at? What were their sales, etc? I figure you’d have more success looking at the console market, but even then, it’s turn-based strategy market is probably very very different than XCOM.
Point is no on has recreated it…it’s not magic (though I think a great game requires love) the core features that made it a success anre no fuzzy non functional requiments, they are measurable…its just no one has had the determination to take it on. Why that really is…is the design scope to ambitous for most design teams? to expensive? are is the marketing crunchers steering clear because the game’s increasing old and the clones have desingated the design to niche status?.. or is there another reason?
This is really unfair. You’ve taken the art, the intuition, out of game development. Fitch calls it chemistry, but it’s a very real and valid component. You’ve basically reduced their jobs to a formula. What’s it say about them when you tell them it’s obvious and they just can’t plug in the numbers?
I’d like to believe you think games are more than a sum of their parts.
I’m asking… pretty please, pretty please… don’t use the re-hash/remake aspect as your main arguement. One of my main functions now in Project Management is doing cost analysis and ROI research…and I’m already tempted to write a 5 page ppt with breakdown of every succesful remake and net sales for the past 20 years (where I can find the data) to win this point :)
I think I can swallow that making a great remake is very difficult if its not the same developers, but saying a re-makes doesn’t sell is absurd to me…and I cringe if the industry as a whole has that impression.
He’s saying remakes of this game do not sell traditionally.
I’ll conceed that some remakes do fail for following to closey the orignal design…in nearly every case I can think of this was because the remake choose to stick so close to the orignal design where similar features in modern products had surpassed the remake. Dune 3 and a few others that come to mind suffered a little from this “retro backlash”. Why play a retro title when nwe games have better features. However, as I pointed out X-com was a game that used unique features that are only now starting to catch on (such as destructable enviros and modeling multi floor buildings inside and out on the same map, and combining detailed tactial and strategic layers). Nearly all the features and combination of features are still only seen pretty rarely (and usually on top selling or criticaly acclaimed titles)…and as I said never all together…even forgetting the theme of aliens
The biggest barrier is it’s turn based. How would you feel if it became real time? Then let’s look at all the real time copy cats? I’ve haven’t followed XCom remakes closely, but if there are real times ones, how well have they done?
In general, sure. But X-Com has yet to be topped.
But isn’t it fair to say that the top-line titles in the retail space for the turn based strategy genre require much less money to compete with than the top-line titles in, say, the RTS or FPS genre? It’s all relative.
I’m not saying they didn’t care about their games. I’m saying that a) they haven’t truly tried to make a new X-COM without radically changing the gameplay (IE going realtime or some other BS), or they have tried and simply haven’t had the resources to make a game that doesn’t look like it should have come out in 1999, because the publisher wasn’t trying. I’m in no way implying that making a great game is easy - I may be an ignorant journalist, but I know that much about the industry.
On a related note:
That drives me nuts whenever I go to talk to devs. I want to hear about the creative process, the trial and error, all the pains they’ve gone to to get this right. That would make the story so much more interesting, I think. But it’s so incredibly hard to get that out of anyone, especially with a PR rep standing right behind them, that it virtually never happens.
We do for now… anyone had any luck getting the original to run on Vista? I know the Steam version won’t. And my monitor doesn’t even support 640x480, much less 320x200! We’re going to lose the original just because the tech is so old.
But you know, having thought a little more about it, do you know what turns me off most about 90% of the X-COM clones out there? The interface. They’re all somehow less intuitive and more difficult to use than that of a game that came out more than a decade ago. Equipping my troops for battle should not take longer than the battle itself - X-COM had enough problems with this when the squads got large, but everything since has just gotten worse.