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DEAD MAN'S SHOE posted:Anyone claiming that this isn't a significant financial and publicity milestone in audience-commissioned entertainment is a contrarian moron. The publisher-as-gatekeeper situation is detrimental in every way but share price. Oh man, don't get me started on the publisher as gatekeeper argument. In every hobby of mine (board games, video games, RPGs) there's that one rear end in a top hat who thinks publishers keep people honest and halt the flood of lovely titles from no-name talents. We're always arguing about the lack of originality in video games but who do you think keeps the originality out? Not the designers, that's for sure.
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Feb 10, 2012 02:13
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theblackw0lf posted:Cost of other Tim Schafer games, to put this in perspective. I'm curious what Telltale runs since they reuse a lot of assets. Monkey Island and Full Throttle required heavy modifications to SCUMM and Psychonauts and Brutal Legend used custom built engines which is expensive as gently caress. Psychonauts and Brutal Legend had horribly problematic development cycles. Psychonauts took something like 4 years to develop and they lost Microsoft as a publisher before being picked up by lovely Majesco. Brutal Legend started as a multiplayer game, was forced into a single-player Guitar Hero tie-in by Activision, shelved for a year, then picked up by EA later. Trenched and the later titles probably cost considerably less without all the publisher fuckings that went on with those two games.
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Feb 10, 2012 03:03
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Assuming pre-orders account for maybe 10% of a game's lifelong sales, then the 15,000 kickstarter backers who pledged the bare minimum for the game are probably 1% of the lifelong sales. Considering the ignorance of how Kickstarter works in general (I'm investing but getting nothing in return/why should I foot the bill for a theoretical project/My rear end itches/blahblahblah), there's probably a huge audience of potential buyers who are in the "wait and see" crowd. Either way, they've doubled their goal and then some. Any "lost sale" can be written off immediately.
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Feb 10, 2012 03:55
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Someone needs to call CDPR and ask them how the gently caress The Witcher 2 was budgeted at about $10-12 million USD despite having its own engine and being the equivalent of a AAA title. Is it just a case of everything made in America costing 10x more to produce than other countries? Dragon Age 2 probably cost twice as much (at least) despite reusing resources everywhere and looking like rear end.
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Feb 10, 2012 20:29
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big duck equals goose posted:Don't get me wrong, I like games with a good story, but that is all planescape had. The idea that a game can consist only off of decent writing is pretty ridiculous in my humble opinion. For example, take the original Dues Ex. It had a great story, great gameplay, and it didn't force feed books worth of dialog. Aren't you the same guy who made a big deal about Limbo because of trial and error puzzles or something despite majority of the puzzles containing context clues or hints if you didn't plow through them and flip every switch as soon as possible? Anyway, opinions are assholes etc. but video games by and large still have juvenile lovely stories written by hack writers who couldn't make it to television. Gameplay gets in the way of good writing because you have to make concessions for the player. Take the Uncharted series: great set pieces, great gameplay but I can't get behind the story at all because when the game takes the controller away from my hand there's no danger. Five minutes ago I'm Nathan Drake, one-man-army, but in this little cutscene they want me to accept that I would just throw my hands up in defeat because someone held a gun to my back? gently caress no, I would shoot them in the face but I can't because the "story" says I can't. In Human Revolution why is Jensen just standing around while the boss prattles on? I was playing a stealthy guy! My immersion is ruined! Oh, and I love the "badguy talks behind unbreakable glass" routine just so you can hear their maniacal laughter but you can't move an inch until they run away. Bullshit, all of it. There are a lot of concessions to make when developing a game and the balance between game and writing is one of the big ones. Balancing the two is a difficult task that only a few companies have gotten right. I, as a gamer, would prefer one extreme over the other. Give me Serious Sam 3 or Planescape but don't give me a piece of poo poo waste of time like Battlefield 3's campaign or Homefront. Even Deus Ex was incredibly goofy with in-house voice acting and clunky, useless weapons unless you pumped tons of points into them. One of the biggest criticisms about DE when it came out in 2000 was how dated it felt but the game receives so much praise for how novel it is. 10 years later I haven't seen a game with equivalent level design or an approach to story telling that amounts to "You get out of the game what you put into it." And don't use the argument "read a book, it's better." There are many things games can do that books can't. Planescape was all about trust and betrayal. You could blow through the game and never truly know about yourself or past lives and your perception of the events would be different. But no book could have replicated that sudden feeling of revulsion with each new memory that you, the player, triggered. No book could have doted on the several dozen NPCs, all who had been affected by you in some way, trivial or large, in your previous life. There was a Planescape book... and it was poo poo. They named the main character and it had none of the subtleties as the game. No book would have had the same impact as discovering "Milla's Children" or looking through Big Boss' teary eye at the end of MGS3. No, adventure games aren't much games if your criteria for "game" is how many complex things you're supposed to be doing at once but I would rather have minimalistic gameplay and a good story (or the reverse) over so-so gameplay and an average story that tries to be greater than it actually is (see every Bioware game since Baldur's Gate). al-azad fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Feb 10, 2012 |
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Feb 10, 2012 21:09
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