Bioshock Infinite, Devil May Cry, SimCity The first few months of the year are, as ever, a time for the public and publishers alike to draw breath after the Christmas frenzy. Only a handful of full-price games launch, giving gamers time to catch a breath and ponder what they’ll spend their money on in the year to come. That said, this period is already clocking up …
The only problem with SimCity is that you have to be online to play it.
There has been many forum posts wanting it to be an off-line game like previous SimCities and not be at the mercy of EA when they decide to turn off the servers.
It's the type of game that you would play if there wasnt an internet connection available.
Unless you've played the beta, how do you know an offline mode makes sense? It's presumably a new game, not just a rehash with newer graphics - since SC2000 the audience has changed massively - literally a whole generation of new gamers have been born and reached an age to buy games.
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As somebody who put a lot of time and effort into bug-reporting during the recent closed beta, I'd question how much time the article author spent playing it...
During the three days of beta, EA's servers were knocked offline for 24 hours, meaning that nobody could play at all during that time. At other times there was an arcane lobby system in place, which would only allow a login check once every 15 minutes to decide whether or not we would get the privilege of playing.
Even once you managed to get into the game, if the servers went AWOL then the game didn't handle it very gracefully. At best, the user would just notice some weird in-game behaviour (it wasn't possible to put buildings anywhere on land, because the game thought that all of the land was water). At worst, there was an "Error connecting to Origin" message, with a solitary Quit button, and all progress was lost.
In short: Online games have their place, but forcing online connectivity for a solo gameplay experience is maddening. Also, expect Diablo III-esque failures on release day.
Saints Row is (or was) just a poor man's GTA in my view. Each to their own, though. I enjoyed the fully immersive and sometimes intense experience of GTA. It was like being in a movie that lasted for several weeks, and changed depending on what I did. But you're right about it being a grind; definitely not a game to bring out if you want a quick blast and don't have a few hours spare to develop the story.
I enjoyed GTA4, and have played through the story a couple of times, but having just gone back to San Andreas I have to agree that 4 is missing some of the fun element. In 4, once I'd finished the story that was pretty much it - I couldn't really be bothered with with the extras/side missions. With San Andreas I've long since finished the story, and I'm still firing it up for a blast pretty much every weekend.
Ha ha, I've been playing GTA San Andreas on the PS2 recently since my kids took over every other machine in the house. There's still tons of stuff I haven't finished, and I never managed to finish the casino mission as the girlfriend mission is bugged; she's never home!
Nothing more fun than cruising round stealing cars, apart from flying the harrier!
> I never managed to finish the casino mission as the girlfriend mission is bugged; she's never home!
Apparently if you hang around the area for a few ingame days she reappears. Bit of a ballache, but probably worth it - the mission where you do the actual casino heist is fantastic.
You just can't beat flying around causing havoc, though my weapon of choice is the Apache-style chopper rather than the plane - great for doing the Vigilante missions too.
> I gave up on GTA 4 after a few hours. Too serious for its own good, and far too much of a grind, whereas SR 2 was a whole lot of fun. SR 3 got a bit silly though.
Part of the fun of GTA was punting the mission and just dicking about blowing stuff up; GTA4 seemed to forget that. I spent a couple of hours being a glorified taxi driver and was left deeply bored (and with a burning hatred for Nico's cousin).
SR3 managed a much better doing stuff / dicking around balance and I found it a far more entertaining game.
My favourite of the batch was Just Cause 2, which takes the dicking around and turns it into a core game mechanic. You just have to get past the fact that the story is ludicrous (wtf, ninjas?!) and the main character is apparently voiced by Pepe the Prawn...
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I dunno I think some people have rose tinted glasses on when the play GTA 4. The mission (especially early game) were boring to the point of depression. Pick up a girl and take her home, then go pick her up and take her bowling. All stuff you could be doing in real life faithfully recreated in a game. Saints row 3 might of been outrageous and silly but it was a LOT of fun to play. It had a much better story line than GTA4 with ability to do crazy side missions. There is no contest, SR3 = Full, GTA 4 = Mundane.
Bored with people complaining about the always online bit about Sim City, if it bothers you that much don't buy it. If it bothered enough people that it affects sales then I'm sure EA would do something. However we all know these people will buy the game so EA don't care. My only fear for Sim City is will it be a nickle and dime game like Sims 3?. When you buy Sims 3 (for those who haven't played it) you buy some of the game, with lots of extra content for sim points. Ofc. sim points cost real money. You get 1 map to play on for free, the other 5 or 6 cost money.. It's all designed to get you hooked and then empty your wallet. :/
What I don't like about SR3 is the driving model, GTA4's isn't perfect but you can actually drive around the city, take corners at speed in a semi-realistic manner.
In SR3 I find it's just way to sensitive, braking stops the car instantly etc. and there are lots of glitches where you try a run up to a jump and you end up getting thrown up in the air by some tiny glitch in the scenery.
And what with the top speed of about 50mph in SR3?
Hell, I'm still working through the last couple of relatively ancient games I bought from gog.com. On the rare occasions when I fire up a console, I'm still working through games for the original Playstation (though now I use a PS2 I got for free from a neighbor).
Mind you, I'm glad there are folks who rush out to buy the latest games - they subsidize development, which does occasionally lead to something new and interesting (and which I may get to before I perish from old age and/or heroically paying the ultimate price while defeating a world-dominating villain). If everyone bought games the way I do, there wouldn't be any commercial development.
Looking forward to Bioshock Infinite with some reservations.
Part of the charm of 1&2 was the gorgeous art-deco underwater city. An early 20th century floating city might not have the same atmosphere (excuse the pun).
Hopefully they haven't turned it into yet another brainless pointlessly violent bang-bang-saw-saw FPS, hopefully there is still a story.
Also this year, looking forward to GTA5. Only problem will be the Skyrim problem, in which I wont get enough spare hours to properly play it!
> Hopefully they haven't turned it into yet another brainless pointlessly violent bang-bang-saw-saw FPS, hopefully there is still a story.
Bioshock was a massive step backwards in this department and the sequel by all accounts is worse. It doesn't bode well for Infinite.
/Sigh. The System Shock form is dead, insect....
I bought a physical copy of Mass Effect 3 last month. It was cheaper than the download version, and I figured it would be standalone. I was wrong. When I got home and tried installing it, the first thing it tried when I plugged in the serial was ónline activation'. Unfortunately for me, the EA/Origin servers were out, and the game install would not complete.
At this point I had two options : either keep trying untill EA got their ass in gear, or download an illegal exe replacement allowing me to play without registering.
Why doe these companies insist on alienating their paying audience ?
I too loved xwing and tie fighter. There was also Freespace 1 & 2 and Starlancer and Freelancer. Oh and the wing commander games.
They don't make these kind of games any more. It's a lot of FPS's now.
Starting to hope FPS's get banned by Governments, not because I think it will have any effect on gun crime. Just that we might get some more interesting games at the end of it.
Me too.
Happily, as mentioned in the article, there is hope coming in the form of Elite:Dangerous (and surely the success of that Kickstarter campaign should tell the industry there is still a demand out there). That's a way off, in the meantime I've been finding Wing Commander Saga pretty entertaining, which for the bargain price of free may interest you....
Happily, as mentioned in the article, there is hope coming in the form of Elite:Dangerous (and surely the success of that Kickstarter campaign should tell the industry there is still a demand out there).
More importantly, what about the massive success of Star Citizen (the new game by Chris "Wing Commander" Roberts) on Kickstarter? From memory he raised 6 million quid (although he also has a number of private backers, so definitely has the money to produce a proper AAA title).
"6 million quid (although he also has a number of private backers, so definitely has the money to produce a proper AAA title)"
He'd better have a lot of private backers, then, because that six million will barely pay for the offices, equipment, infrastructure, legal, and ancillary staff let alone an actual dev team, marketing, QA, etc etc etc...
Business is a hell of a lot more expensive than people think. I run an absolutely tiny manufacturing business, in the US, where things are fairly cheap, and for a fairly small building and 10 people, the costs for payroll, taxes, electricity, maintenance, etc, hit around $40,000 a month. If we were going to make a product in 20 months, it'd cost us ~$1m just to sit idle in an empty building.
And we don't even have to pay for the building!
There might also be 'Destiny', the upcoming game from Bungie. Details are scant, but it might include some space combat and exploration, as well as "shooting aliens in the face". They have posted a job advert for a 'economy designer'. One gets the impression that they too have grown bored of pure FPS games.
One level of Halo: Reach (the last Halo title to be developed by Bungie) one level was space combat- though X-Wing it wasn't.
I too, miss space combat. A LOT. And I don't even care if they go for Newtonian Physics or WW II style dogfighting.
There is even some mix of it with online FPS via mod for Half-Life, on the same Steam. It is totally free, being a mod, if you have HL2, called Eternal Silence. On this, you can literally engage "Newtonian Physics" and let the ship fly straight without powered engines, while turning to shoot your enemies, like a Chicago gangster drive-by shooting.
I remember Freespace (or Descent Freespace) to be quite nice, except for the targeting system that was WAY too complex - "target your target's target" actually describes one of the keybinds,
I heard of Eve Online being about ships in outerspace, but I don't know how closely related to the genre it is, since I never played it.
The first two occasionally force me to dust my old joystick...
On WW 2 style, we may have in the near future World of Warplanes, that would be a spinoff of World of Tanks, that broke the record for the "Game with the most simultaneous players online". It is expected to be a Freemium release, which means you can literally "pay to win" upgrades and new planes at your disposal. Being russian, and never having played World of Tanks, I don't know what to expect either.
I LOVED X - WING and am looking forward to Elite. Although I Would love a reboot of Atari's I-War. I lost my copies so can't build a Win 98 machine to play it.
I'm so tired of FPS that hopefully someone will start back on the space flight sims. Maybe even a new Mechwarrior, the simulator, not the 3rd person console ones would be fantastic, there was another one that I can't remember where the mechs had wheels as well as legs Battle something or other, a reboot of that would be cool as well.
I would happily kick towards any Kickstarter that did those with some hope of good quality gaming. Especially if they did it on the Mac, I feel my 27 inch iMac is wasted on Aperture
Most game studios are way too content to have their games appeal to the masses for 2 months then dump them and bring a new project. I feel like the Browser Game genre and Facebook in particular to blame for this. Many companies are now trying to pull in a less dedicated playing crowd for quick inital sales profit because most of the newer crowd of gamers will get bored and drop the game in a few months anyway. Games no longer have difficulty or require thinking, just extra cash and lots of clicks.
I won't apologize for lazy development (hell, I usually go guns blazing when it comes to poor design) but it's possible to be not-lazy, put together a small, fun and challenging game, make it work for cheap, and profit. Angry Birds is the obvious example, but even on the PC, Portal is marvellous in its simplicity and progressive difficulty. And it works for non-admins on Windows 8. Who'd have figured?
Browser games can be not-lazy, casual or deviously difficult, cheap, and profitable. I've ragged on Puzzle Pirates before for poor design choices, but their staff do listen and do fix their mistakes. There's a good example of a browser game that's easy to learn but difficult to master, and will take as much time as you're prepared to give it.
A good developer mindset will produce good games, regardless of target audience or platform. A poor developer mindset will produce Duke Nukem Forever.... :-)
Zelda - been regurgitating the same basic game for 20+ years
Battlefield 3 - A CoD clone (with multiplayer from BF2)
GTA - More of the same
Darksiders - New and interesting setting with game style based loosely on Zelda.
Homefront - Another new setting (although it stretches suspension of disbelief a bit). Pity about the game.
Saint's Row - While at its core it's a GTA clone, it takes "over the top" WAY over the top. GTA4 was a sim, SR3 was a GAME.
My understanding is Darksiders was a moderate success, Homefront bombed because the game itself was bad, and SR was basically successful, if not as wildly successful as GTA.
Quite possibly THQ failed BECAUSE they attempted originality and the public, broadly speaking, didn't want it.
Nail & head on this, I would say:
"Quite possibly THQ failed BECAUSE they attempted originality and the public, broadly speaking, didn't want it."
Kids have been raised on FPS (yes i am generalising but just take a look at the games most teenagers-20's flock to) and whilst GTA and the like also get played it is damn difficult to bring originality into the gaming genre these days..
I am hoping MS & Sony can bring a closer collaboration of the console and PC with their new consoles which may give the gaming industry a broader scope in which to inject originality (although how that could be possible I admit i would not have the first clue..).
"My understanding is Darksiders was a moderate success,"
No, this isn't true... Darksiders, the original, was a moderate success, so much so that they were in two minds whether to even bother to make a sequel. They eventually decided on it and I think this firmly showed that they should not have made a sequel since it was just a re-hash of the same game.
Aren't we overlooking DoW here? That was a massive THQ owned franchise that had only gone downhill in recent times and I don't hold much hope for DoW 3. THQ failed for a multitude of reasons but being "too original" was most certainly not one of them, Darksiders was just a clone of 'God of War" for example...
Also Battlefield 3, a clone of CoD? Yes, I guess you may be onto something there. In the same way that Ridge Racer is a clone of Grand Turismo... As in they happen to be the same genre. I feel if you want to draw the similarities of CoD and BF3 into question then you can't ignore that God of War and Darksiders are practically the same game.
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