277 replies to this topic

[Malooko]

Not much to add to this thread other than I thought that Freespace and Battlezone were some of the best older game out there that I have played.

And now that I think of it, there have been several recent IP's that have been completely killed by the devs trying something different. Red Faction: Armageddon and C&C4: TT come to mind. Now I know that C&C4 was the last one of the series, but they completely killed it and that is how people will forever remember how over a decade of gaming came to an end.

I personally didn't think that the last RF was even THAT bad. I actually enjoyed it, but the suits have come out and said that they will drop the franchise.

I would love to see a new (well-done mind you) Freespace or Battlezone in the future.

[Algorhythmic]

Sephlock, on 13 August 2012 - 01:51 PM, said:

Well you could buy Master of Orion 3 .

Troll. =/

Edited by IlIlI, 13 August 2012 - 02:01 PM.

[Bansheedragon75]

IlIlI, on 13 August 2012 - 02:00 PM, said:

Troll.

The only troll I see here is you.
MOO3 does exist if thats your issue.

Edited by Dragonlord, 13 August 2012 - 02:02 PM.

[Dervim]

Planescape is the best RPG of all times...Ok, maybe it rivals with Fallout 2 for that spot

Also, Mechcommander - damn I love those games! Loved the videos, loved stories and played them over and over again.

[Melcyna]

Dragonlord, on 13 August 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

The only troll I see here is you.
MOO3 does exist if thats your issue.

He's probably referring to the fact that MOO3 is SO BAD, that MOO fans prefer to believe it never existed.

Malooko, on 13 August 2012 - 01:52 PM, said:

Not much to add to this thread other than I thought that Freespace and Battlezone were some of the best older game out there that I have played.

And now that I think of it, there have been several recent IP's that have been completely killed by the devs trying something different. Red Faction: Armageddon and C&C4: TT come to mind. Now I know that C&C4 was the last one of the series, but they completely killed it and that is how people will forever remember how over a decade of gaming came to an end.

I personally didn't think that the last RF was even THAT bad. I actually enjoyed it, but the suits have come out and said that they will drop the franchise.

I would love to see a new (well-done mind you) Freespace or Battlezone in the future.

Unless Volition acquire the license for it from Interplay (last i recall it's still in the hands of Interplay)

that's probably not gonna happen.

And for that to happen, THQ have to pull itself out of the dire strait it is in right now, and even then chances are very low they will ever agree to Freespace 3 in the current age of games where the genre is considered high risk.

[Algorhythmic]

Dragonlord, on 13 August 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

The only troll I see here is you.
MOO3 does exist if thats your issue.

And it is no where near as good.

[Adridos]

Melcyna, on 13 August 2012 - 02:04 PM, said:

Unless Volition acquire the license for it from Interplay (last i recall it's still in the hands of Interplay)

And for that to happen, THQ have to pull itself out of the dire strait it is in right now, and even then chances are very low they will ever agree to Freespace 3 in the current age of games where the genre is considered high risk.

Violition does have the rights for Free Space.

However, even thouh they made the best space simulator ever created, it sold so poorly you couldn't even buy a biger house for it, let alone keep company going to make a 3rd one.

[Sam Slade]

Woska, on 13 August 2012 - 07:13 AM, said:

Also, the marketing guys have taken on much more power

You really don't know how true this is. Marketing in the industry as a whole has been calling the shots for quite a while; they saw that for the last five to ten years they were selling consoles on the 'bigger, better, faster, stronger' ethos(the person that decided to call it a Playstation 2 is a marketing god) and they applied that to games. Then consoles began to equal PCs in processing power and the 'bug army' of cross platform content arrived.

Now however the larger stuck-in-their-ways conglomerates that grew out of this console boom are faced with an issue their old business plan wasn't built for; namely sophisticated consumers. It is no longer enough to have a pretty game, not even a pretty game with good 'playability', you need to have both of these and a point. That point has to have a story, it could be a player driven story like Civilization games or a narrative like Assassins Creed(which is way too easy) but it cannot afford to fall down in any other respect.

That is why we are seeing struggles over intellectual property get more and more ugly and why people, in MWO for example, howl for blood if the story of their beloved I.P. isn't told fast and accuratly.

So the issue is that the content developers with the big budgets still have not caught up with the concept that their primary consumers no longer get their products in a birthday present box but rather make informed(where possible) decisions of their own and if they are dissapointed will not be back.

Expect to see the big development groups turning greedy eyes on smaller 'indie' developers and turning their games to garbage for a few years yet... but then also expect to see some of them start to hire professional writers and producers with no concept of 'graphics drivers' to help develop their games; this is where the new quality products will come from.

[Elessar]

Melcyna, on 13 August 2012 - 02:04 PM, said:

He's probably referring to the fact that MOO3 is SO BAD, that MOO fans prefer to believe it never existed.


...

One has to say thatMoO3 definitely has gotten better. While it was riddled with bugs at release and over long time didn´t have functioning PD, the bugs have been removed and, while the game still has a learning cliff instead of a learning curve, it is de facto enjoyable, if you give it a chance and climb the learning cliff.


As for the quality of computer games nowadays ...
I have to agree that it has become worse and worse...
I remember the release of Sword of the Stars 2 and Stronghold 3 last year.
Both were release in a state that wasn´t even Beta worthy.

While Sword of the Stars 2 has gotten better and is now truely worth of playing due to the hard work of the developers after release, Stronghold 3 is now (in a state where developers announced no more patches) still worse than Stronghold 1 and 2.

I also remember Civilization V, which has been released in 2010 in an extremly dumped down state compared to Civilization IV, with less features and an AI, that wasn´t a competition to players.
While the last addon (Gods & Kings) has improved the game a little bit, it is still worse than Civ IV (although with better graphics).


So I agree ... on the one hand it seems to be pressure by the publishers, which enforces release in a too early state.
On the other hand often publishers (or sometimes the developers themselves) seem to enforce/produce games that require less intelligence, in an effort to appease a larger mass of (casual) gamers.

A good example for the latter is also MS Flight. Despite the fact that MS Flightsimulator X was extremly successful (and generated lots of sales) Microsoft seemed to believe that by dumbing down the game and making it F2P, they could attract a larger crowd of (casual) gamers.
Well, the experiment failed remarkably ... a majority of the former customers of FSX stayed away from MS Flight and the casual gamers that that were attracted by MS Flight weren´t willing to spend (enough) mony on premium content, so that, only hald a year after its release, MS Flight was given up.
Pity ... had they remained true to the series and released an FS XI with the same complexity as FS X, with mybe better graphics and more simulated weather effects, they probably would have been able to repeat the successes of FS X with regards to sales.

Fortunately for Flightsims not everything is lost ... on the one hand there are non military fligth sims that continue the legacy of FSX, as well as on a military level DCS with its in depth simulation of the Blackshark and the A-10 Warthog

Edited by Elessar, 13 August 2012 - 02:41 PM.

[Algorhythmic]

The big studios do focus on "accessibility" though frankly I think even that excuse fails to cover Civ5.

Edited by IlIlI, 13 August 2012 - 02:41 PM.

[Fabe]

Dragonlord, on 13 August 2012 - 10:29 AM, said:

Just came over that game myself after reading about MWO and E3, which had a link to IGN where you can vote for most anticipated game 2012.

I just watched the video for that game, but when I looked at the pre-order page I got very concerned about the quality of this game.
What worries me is the fact that its not just released for PC, but for Xbox 360 and PS3 as well.

Well I'm not worried about the new XCom,the DLC seems to be all cosmetic stuff and even if they where selling uber weapons or something it's a single player game so who cares if some other guy gets to start the game with the blaster bomb launcher. As for the cross platform release I've read that each version will have it's own control set up so its not like their making it for just one platfrom then porting it over so I'm not worried them either.

[john shadow]

ya i got bf3 it was a mess.dam near went nuts trying to play with all the crashing, not working, and much much more.i will never buy a game before its fixed agian!so i will wait for a month or two before i buy.PS bf3 is fantastic now!

[th3 fr4gil3]

and just remember all you old kesmei battletech players, it was EA who bought them out and then pulled the plug on mpbt:3025.

[Artgathan]

If we're simply using the bug count as a measure of quality then of course games have gotten worse for one simple reason: they got more complex.

Think about it. On really old games, ones that played on a floppy disc, developers had a whopping 240MB (in 1999, when they were on the out) to program with. That's not very much coding to do, or to proofread. So bugs were easier to find and take out. Compare that to games that are nowadays routinely larger than 4GB. That's a chunk of code 17X larger than that of games of yore: of course more bugs make it through. Even the largest CDs could only hold about 900MB.

I would be willing to bet that the average number of bugs per 100MB of data has remained constant (or possibly even dropped a bit recently), but due to the sheer size of new releases the number of bugs steadily increases.

[Blaze32]

Dragonlord, on 13 August 2012 - 08:28 AM, said:

And what about games that requires you to actually think and work to progress?

One example is Myst, if anyone remember that, where you actually had to think to progress.
Then there is one of my All time series of Final Fantasy.

Love those games my all times favorites altough i only played Final fantasy 7 it was good. Some older games i loved were.
I loved the trilogy of the myst games(myst riven,Exile) with the challange and longutivity of the game you bearly noticed the picture and non-moving images and minimal sounds (i still loved them all). Anouther game, if you like challanging puzzles, is Portal it is awesome, although the game is only around 10 to 11 hours long it is fun!!
Anouther if you like older games that are compleatly open I suggest Privateer the origional not the remake crap that ruined it! By compleatly open i mean it was what ever you wanted to do. you could play forever if you wanted.

[th3 fr4gil3]

hmm wasn't terra nova richard gariotts project (lord british of ultima fame)?

Adridos, on 13 August 2012 - 02:14 PM, said:

Violition does have the rights for Free Space.

However, even thouh they made the best space simulator ever created, it sold so poorly you couldn't even buy a biger house for it, let alone keep company going to make a 3rd one.

FreeSpace 3?

There is no FreeSpace 3. Volition was bought by THQ in 2000, with the licenses remaining with Interplay. Volition couldn't create a new game in the series and Interplay was not interested in publishing space simulation games because the genre was deemed dead. More information about FreeSpace 3 and related things can be read from Karajorma's FreeSpace FAQ.

source: http://www.hard-ligh...#FreeSpace_3.3F

Edited by th3 fr4gil3, 13 August 2012 - 03:23 PM.

[Gingo]

bryo4321, on 13 August 2012 - 01:06 PM, said:

In my opinion, a lot of people just remember playing games when they were kids/teens, so they have a lot of nostalgic memories, and it creates a sort of bias that, bah everything sucks now.

I can absolutely say thats not the case, at least for me.
I still play Morrowind at least twice a month, Daggerfall now and then, Caesar 3, Planescape Torment, Fallout 2, Rome: Total War, Baldurs Gate 1&2, some Ultima, and, of course, Angband, Stonesoup, Nethack...

[Gasboy]

Dragonlord, on 13 August 2012 - 06:44 AM, said:

A game I pre-ordered, Legends of Pegasus (4x Space RTS), was released 3 days ago, when the game was released in was riddled with bugs, I'm talking gamebreaking bugs, such as the game crashing randomly, players unable to save/load games, and unable to move ships ingame.

It was the same with Might & Magic Heroes VI (in the Heroes of might & magic), the game was riddled with bugs, many of them gamebreaking and the game felt like an early beta as well.

Then there is Diablo 3 which had allot of hype, but turned out to me a major disappointment. I know some people swear its a greats game, but I dont agree and it seems many others dont either. It feels more like a hack'n slash game that are relying on the success of its predecessors, just like many other games seems to do today.

Hehe, there are so many points to address, it's hard to pick a place to start.

The Short Answer: The Internet.

The Long Answer: Games appeared to be better coded in the past because there wasn't an easy way to disseminate patches or updates. If you shipped a buggy game, people would simply toss it away, give it away, or maybe see if they could get their money back. The Internet allows game developers and publishers to lower their costs by enabling digital downloading of their product, as well, they can facilitate easy patching and upgrading. As well, the Internet is probably the greatest hype machine the world's ever seen.

It is sad that game devs/publishers use the Internet as a crutch, but look at it this way: There are millions of game fans, each with their own computer, the stats of which are all different. How much play testing does a company have to do before they can be reasonably sure their game will work in a majority of cases. Especially considering this: If you sell a million games on opening day, and all of those people play exactly one hour, your game will have just had 115 years of time played. I think at some point game companies just roll the dice. Sometimes you get a Skyrim launch, other times you get Diablo 3.

While it bothers me sometimes, I don't mind it too much. It means if a game is well and truely messed up, it can be fixed fairly speedily. And you can tell which are the good from the bad: Blizzard has stood behind its game and has been working hard to smooth out all the issues. Microsoft killed the entire dev team, and the support team, for the last Shadowrun game back in 2007, after only a few months of the game's existence. Effectively killing the game and any hope of righting any of the problems. I was annoyed at both game launches, however, I will still purchase a Blizzard game without much concern, where as I will be wary about buying games from people backed by Microsoft.

[Vieric]

anymore, its all about pleasing as many people as possible. Which means going after the lowest common denominator. That said, they try to make the most simple thing they can that a lot of people will enjoy (hence the high amount of FPS games anymore). More recently, it seems even that's been abandoned, now its all about making a shiny box and cramming just enough game in to legally sell it, it seems.

I don't know when games became all about looks, but I don't like it. If I want to watch something pretty, I'd go see a movie. Good graphics are great things to have, but NOT at the expense of the game itself (which always seems to happen anymore).

As someone who grew up playing an NES, I am dying on the inside. Fortunately Indie teams are popping up to keep the fires of old burning, its just...finding them is a bit of a trick.

Edited by Vieric, 13 August 2012 - 03:35 PM.

[th3 fr4gil3]

hey gasboy, i've heard from my shadowrun GM that the 2007 game was horrendous and putting out of it's misery was a kindness and a service to mankind.
btw what do you think of the new games? shadowrun returns and shadowrun online.
tbh i looked at the videos for 'online' and thought to myself "is this really a online game?" it looks more single player to me almost what i'd expect 'returns' to be like.
there are oddly no screenshots for 'returns'