Few Thoughts & Queries..

(zenstar) #21

[QUOTE=gold163;388432]Amen to that, brother.

in retrospect it was idiotic of me to just accept that there would be no demo for Brink. What the hell happened? I remember Epic games way back saying that they wouldn’t be releasing a PC demo of Bulletstorm alongside the other demos because they didn’t see the PC platform as economically viable as the others. And Ubisoft is always non-stop bitching about how they can’t sell PC games.

It’s not that hard. Put out a decent game that’s actually built for the platform that people are playing on. Give us a demo so that we don’t have to buy the game in order to see how it is. You get MORE interest by offering a little bit for free than less. I really don’t understand what some of the people in the games industry are thinking these days.[/QUOTE]

Ubisoft can’t sell games because of the horrible DRM they force into the PC games.
Anything that says it’s not coming to PC because it’s not econimically viable is the type of game that’s not going to sell very well.
Anything that refuses to put out a demo (or refuses to demo the game on a single platform) is suspect. Sometimes it’s because they don’t have time / resources, but it’s also just as likely that they’re hiding some flaw.

I remember the good old days of the 3 episode shareware games. Ep 1 free. Ep 2 & 3 for money. that was a good model

(dazman76) #22

And mostly damn good games too :slight_smile: The whole of Quake 1 Episode 1, for free - those days are well and truly behind us now eh? :slight_smile: As a testament to that, I honestly think that if Rage had been released with the same model, the actual purchases of the full game would have been far fewer. It’s not the worst game of 2011, but IMO it hardly measures up to Quake 1 back in it’s day - relatively speaking, of course. I spent most of my first Quake 1 session with my jaw on the floor, having stepped up from Duke 3D and the like. In contrast, I spent most of my first session of Rage trying to reduce texture pop-in and trying to equate what I saw on screen to the spiel emitting from Carmack’s mouth pre-release. Rage was the final nail in the coffin for my long-standing and vaguely justified respect for id software.

There are far too many games these days - and a good handful in 2011 alone - that simply wouldn’t sell anywhere near as many copies if a demo was released. It’s a testament to just how crap modern games can be - while graphics and sound have certainly evolved and improved, mechanics and structure have been largely ignored. Developers still make the same mistakes, and in the most annoying places. Skyrim for example - while definitely being one of the best games of 2011, maybe THE best - has the worst mouse-driven menus I’ve seen for some time. Clicks don’t register, they often register on the wrong menu items, you wind up choosing completely the wrong decision and screwing up forcing a reload. It’s manageable though, and Skyrim earns the dubious award of “being a really big and complex game, and not screwing up as much as it potentially could screw up”. Others manage to compound the problem by bundling screw-ups together, and a gamer should be forgiven for thinking they’ve been there before. Unskippable cutscenes, save points/checkpoints that lead to repeating the same 5 minutes of gameplay until you finally overcome the broken controls and buggy AI. Very few innovations - in fact big-hitting games can often be behind simple, cheap Indie games when it comes to improving these basic features or avoiding classic pitfalls that so many large developers seem to walk straight into - because they’re blinkered and concentrating only on “The Shiny™”.

(zenstar) #23

I do like the indie games. I’ve recently been getting a bunch of the indie royale bundles and there are some stellar little titles in there.
In fact one of my fav new games came from there - Sanctum. Loads of fun. I went off and bought all the DLC levels for that.

I know I’ve been very anti-Beth in my comments but I have to admit that after a recent xmas gettogether with some friends they bought me Rage and Skyrim for the Xbox. Now I can’t be an ungrateful douche and the thought behind the gifts was great so I decided to give them a whirl. I mean I may as well enjoy them now that I’ve got them right? No point in cutting off my nose to spite my face and all that.

Turns out that I need to apologise for Bethesda. I haven’t tried Rage just yet because Skyrim hooked its claws into me and I lost an entire day. Maybe it’s been long enough that they’ve patched things or maybe it’s just the right platform but I’ve had loads of fun playing the game and haven’t found any bugs. It looks pretty enough and plays nice and smoothly and has a large amount of fun packed in there.
I’m hoping that Rage is the same. My friend (who played it on Xbox) says that he thouroughly enjoyed it and Carmack said that it was made for console first and then adapted to PC, so I’m guessing I’ll just stick to Xbox when it comes to Bethesda titles. They seem better there.
(Just like Ubisoft titles: Hellish DRM on PC, but nice games for Xbox. Ubisoft can stay on my Xbox. <3 Assassin’s Creed II and it plays better with controller anyway.)

(dazman76) #24

Aye, I often make the mistake of criticising Beth but make no distinction between Game Studios, and Softworks. I love Skyrim - and although the PC version is a bit buggy, it’s not the end of the world. I get the feeling I’m going to be playing and enjoying it for some time, and just with the time I’ve spent on it already - it’s more than justified it’s cost, unlike many other games I bought. It’s an epic engine, always beautiful to look at, massive scale, and probably as close to a genuine full world simulation as games will get - for now :slight_smile:

Rage, for me, was “OK” - which was way, way less than I was expecting :slight_smile: In my opinion, it isn’t the best shooter of 2011 - by far. It might be the best “racing with buggies that have pretty crap handling” erm… game of 2011. Potentially undisputed in that new genre :slight_smile: It smacks of over-ambition though - with the first “half” of the game being jam-packed with missions and stuff, and the second “half” (third?) being mostly straight-out shooting with some repetitive travel, and a surprisingly high chance of getting lost in a couple of locations and travelling in circles for 10 minutes. It’s a very drastic shift, one that screams either “oh crap we ran out of time” or “oh crap we really cannot afford to use ANOTHER disc for this”. Unfortunately, being a long-time id fanboy and watching every video I can find that features JC and his tech-talk - well, suffice to say my expectations were somewhat higher than the end result managed to deliver :slight_smile: As I say definitely not the worst game of 2011, but it certainly made me realise that my long-standing and massive respect for id was built purely on Doom 2, Q1, and some light smattering of their products since then. As with SD, I’ll be approaching id’s next game with trepidation - in fact I probably won’t even touch it without a demo, which probably means - due to Beth being scared of try-before-buy - that I won’t be playing either SD or id games in the foreseeable future.

(zenstar) #25

I get the feeling that id make engines nowadays. The game is secondary and is simply there to show off the engine.
Someone else will then take the engine and make something deep and meaningful with it.

I hope I’ll enjoy Rage, but I have read all about the issues people have had with it so (hopefully) I think I’ll be entering with my expectations set to the right levels. I’ll get around to it when Skyrim says I’m allowed to play other games.