Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg,comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure,comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic (
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Knight37 wrote:
>Even games that get touted as truely unique, like Psychonauts, a) don't
>sell that well, and b) are still more or less confined to a genre,
>
This is one of the problems, the idea that every game has the potential,
and therefore MUST, be another UO, with millions of units sold.
Well, actually that's two problems.
The first is the idea of units sold (as the original article pointed
out). For years I kept trying to convince Origins (creators of UO) that
what they had was a Service. But EA made them stick to the idea that
they were in a packaged-sales business, that holding onto monthly fees
from satisfied customers was not as important as selling more boxes
(though their profit from boxes what probably about equal to only one
month's fee anyway). I totally failed to convince them of any such thing.
But the second problem, that a game has to have "something for
everyone," is just as big a killer. There is nothing wrong with a
genre. I am a SF writer, and I readily accept that my novels are not
going to sell millions of copies (unless I get a hit movie deal). Right
now I am engaged in a search for a new game, something in the fantasy
midieval mmorpg line, with factional pvp (wars). The only game I found
that made a clear statement that it would stick to exactly that was
Dragon Empires, which died soon after going into early beta. Dark &
Light is done by french guys (apparently the language is their excuse
for not communicating with their mostly english-speaking fans), and they
occasionally drop hints that they will not have 2 factions, but 2 plus
"neutrals," pk, and will not respond to demands for clarification. No
telling whether they are going to give what I want. Darkfall makes the
same claim as everyone else, that "pk will have a tough time," but we
have heard this before and it never worked out that way.
It's not about there being pk (I kicked a lot of pk butt in UO for over
5 years, and would expect to do more, if needed), it's what they do to
make pk successful, by eliminating from the game what it is that should
make it a factional pvp (war) game, the factional restrictions (so you
know who can attack you and who can't). Where will I ever find the game
I want to play?
microsoft stabs the industry in the back two ways: by doing all these
same things as a distributor, and by paying developers to hard-code a
requirement into their games for a certain operating system (BF2
requires XP, though rumor has it it can be tricked into playing on
win2k). I will not have XP on any system of mine, it being so
completely ridden through with ratware that I have no confidence of
being able to stop it all. I run win2k, and am considering "linspire"
and other linux emulators for when this no longer suffices. It may well
be that billgates alone will kill the PC game, all because there is some
part of the computer world that he feels he doesn't yet control.
>do we really
>think that Dead or Alive 4 is going to innovate gameplay? Or that Quake 4
>is going to innovate gameplay? Or Project Gotham Racing 3? Notice how all
>of these games are sequels of sequels of sequels.
>
That is "Branding," the practice of trying to scrape more bux from an
existing name. More importantly, these rehashes are just rehashes.
Nothing new in the way of function. Players are partly at fault,
demanding certain standards (in mmorpg a vocal minority always manage to
get things included like stealth, pvp stealing, pking, bards, rogues,
everything that flies in the face of what the majority of players
want). In the case of Quake, I played for years, was one of the top
sought-after clan players, but I will never play another id game because
of their policy of killing last year's game to promote this year's game
by releasing source code so as to enable cheaters to have a field day
pissing everyone off on established servers. In that case the
"creative" company killed themselves as far as I'm concerned.
So I went on to Tribes, again climbed the ladder of respectability
(sought by the top clans), and quit for another reason, because I didn't
care for the shittalk and nasty behavior that my own "teammates" kept
dumping on everyone (when you get to a certain age that stuff gets old
too?). At least in mmorpg, if you get tired of the shittalkers, there
IS something else to do.
I have, for some years, thought it would take some $10-12 million to
develop a first-class mmorpg (the big stick of games for some time) and
launch it (the article agrees with this). But it could be done for
less, with enough knowhow. If I could interest investors, who knows?
If anyone really dedicated and willing to stand up to the suits could
bring a really good design to market they could once again be the new
killer ap that would justify people spending money on machines,
connections, and the games. I do not know if this is ever going to happen.
And now I look at this hot new machine and wonder, what did I spend all
that money for? This winter I am gearing up for another round of P&P
roleplaying. I have not had a 20-sided die in my hand for 15 years, and
yet that is what I'm going back to. The promise of the computer has failed.
--
Godwin is a net-nazi
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