Video Games

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Nov 25, 2015 3:49 am

What's that? The Triple A games industry has become a bloated, unsustainable mess that is in danger of collapsing? Shit, that's unexpected, people have only said that for the last five or so years!

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:24 am

Koumei wrote:What's that? The Triple A games industry has become a bloated, unsustainable mess that is in danger of collapsing? Shit, that's unexpected, people have only said that for the last five or so years!

Uh... I think the point about unreasonable sales expectations is both new and a new point.

Publishers have been tossers endlessly reyclying the same IPs and being shitty about anything that sells less than X million units for a long time, but up until recently, they were doing a pretty decent job at guessing how many million units their retreaded reboots of sequels were going to make. It is now looking like they are drastically off now, because all the reboots and sequels are making way less piles of money than projections 2-4 years ago when they started developing the games said they would.

That is at least a new problem.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Nov 25, 2015 4:57 am

Even that's been going on for a bit. I think the first properly nonsensical AAA sales projection I heard of was for Dead Space 3.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Nov 25, 2015 5:44 am

I was under the impression they've been off with those predictions for a while - there have been quite a few reports of "_____ did not sell as many copies as we had expected". Most notably from EA and Ubisoft, IIRC.

I'll concede that I was only looking at a couple of major publishers though, not the industry as a whole.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu Nov 26, 2015 2:34 am

Eventually games reach their local maxima for fun, and any changes just make them worse.

So they make FIFA 2009 or whatever, it's got problems that 2010 fixes, and 2011 adds some stuff people actually wanted, and 2012 smooths out the wrinkles and then the publishers wanted 2013 to also have more stuff or whatever because sales growth curves, woohoo, lets put even more devs on this one!

So the devs added some crap that just made the game worse. But everyone bought it and then bitched about it on the internet. So 2014 gets made with even more crap people don't actually want, only it doesn't sell many copies any more.

Stuff like DOTA2 is where someone figured out you could cut a whole bunch of stupid crap out of Warcraft 3 and make it a much better game (duh, War3 is full of stupid busywork crap), and then that mod got turned into a complete game which very carefully did not add anything to change the play in any way, but still had new "more of the same" you could spend real money on.

The FIFA 20xx model of game development is obviously flawed, but wonderfully suited to the business school ideology of selling happy customers "new and improved" stuff all over again for more money. Their problem is that people still like Tetris, which is to most people just more fun than FIFA 2014, while also being free.

EA games in particular are also a terrible pile of shit quite often. The local maxima for the fun in furiously wiggling the stick for a five minute quicktime event is not high, even though that Olympics game sold really well internationally.

See also Farmville, most people "finished" it, it had no replay option at all, so they added more crap that the customers didn't actually want and it collapsed along with the company. It happens. (NB: farmville and company still exist, but no one cares).

Aryxbez · Post by **Aryxbez** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 12:55 am

Kaelik wrote:That is at least a new problem.

Not really, or depends what you mean by "New" I suppose. Koumei seems to have it right, even as 2-ish years ago, there were companies like Square Enix calling their Tomb Raider et-al, flops.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 1:04 am

Aryxbez wrote:
Kaelik wrote:That is at least a new problem.
Not really, or depends what you mean by "New" I suppose. Koumei seems to have it right, even as 2-ish years ago, there were companies like Square Enix calling their Tomb Raider et-al, flops.

Given the fact that I can't think of more than 5 "big releases" in the last year, as far as getting a decent sample size 2 years might very well be a new problem.

But I think my point is that that thing Koumei said has been a description of the gaming industry since 2001 and probably plataued at maximum fuck in 2008, so yes, things that started happening even three years ago count as new problems compared to a problem that has been a problem since I got most of my games from my mothers buying them for me for Christmas.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Nov 28, 2015 4:11 am

That's a fair enough statement.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sun Nov 29, 2015 10:08 am

Koumei wrote:Shit, that's unexpected, people have only said that for the last five or so years!

The industry isn't "about" to collapse. It's already collapsing.

Konami has already folded on both AAA titles and the global market. Squeenix has stated they'll follow suit if FF-XV flops. The occident market keeps trying to pass Alpha builds/Early Access games for "full releases." Nintendo is just one mass migration away from becoming another Sega.

The only thing keeping this Second Videogame Crash from finishing its work is the kafkian way in which gamers "punish" the industry by bitching on the internet while tossing at them what little money they have.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sun Nov 29, 2015 11:32 am

I'm curious to see the Battlefront sales data. There was so much hype before the release, but now it seems to be considered kinda average-ish.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Mon Nov 30, 2015 3:02 am

I dunno 'bout sales data, but the game itself is massively disappointing.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Mon Nov 30, 2015 3:41 am

Longes wrote:I'm curious to see the Battlefront sales data. There was so much hype before the release, but now it seems to be considered kinda average-ish.

This what I found so far:

http://www.siliconera.com/2015/11/25/th ... s-balance/

Sergarr · Post by **Sergarr** » Mon Nov 30, 2015 12:41 pm

tussock wrote: Stuff like DOTA2 is where someone figured out you could cut a whole bunch of stupid crap out of Warcraft 3 and make it a much better game (duh, War3 is full of stupid busywork crap), and then that mod got turned into a complete game which very carefully did not add anything to change the play in any way, but still had new "more of the same" you could spend real money on.

Weird, for me, DotA was only better than Warcraft 3 in a sense that it better attracted huge crowds of assholes who threw shitfits at anyone on their team without highly detailed knowledge of the rapidly changing meta. But maybe that was just my own personally unique experience, and people really manage to somehow harvest fun out of... that.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Dec 01, 2015 1:31 am

Oh, so I bought Gat Outta Hell on sale the other day.

It's fun. Running around Hell smacking demons down is pretty cool, and the actual flight ability is awesome, compared to SR4's hover thing.

The game play is almost exactly the same as SR4, which I guess shouldn't surprised me, given it's a standalone expansion of SR4, but is slightly disappointing. "Actual Flight (TM)" isn't really enough to make up for lack of customization (of characters, their outfits, or cars, even if super sprint and flight make driving a chump's game) especially when the rest of the game is just a reskin of mini-games from SR4 and some pretty formulaic missions.

It's fun, I just hoped for something more. But I paid $5 for it, and get to play Kinzie, so I'm not too broken up over it.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Tue Dec 01, 2015 7:47 am

For an moment I thought you where talking about an Shadowrun game. Had to google it.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Dec 01, 2015 9:54 am

My biggest problems with Gat Outta Hell are:
1. Hell is boring and bland.
2. I give a negative ammount of fucks about Johnny Gat and how "awshum" he is.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Dec 02, 2015 9:06 am

Hell is just Steelport with fire, which is sort of boring, but I entered the franchise at SR3, so I'm sort of used to it. But yeah, the lack of business takeover and other more meaningful mini-games was boring.

Gat is a great character. To watch in cutscenes. I too give no fucks about playing as him, and would much rather play as my Boss. This is why (well, a reason why) I played Kinzie.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Thu Dec 03, 2015 12:19 pm

I too played mostly as Kinzie, rather than Gat. I did love the flight mechanic of the game, though. Still, game only gets a 6 or 7 out of 10 for me. Mostly same-old material.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Thu Dec 03, 2015 11:37 pm

Yeah, I played Gat for the requisite two hours for completion, and was disappointed that the end scenario switched to control of him. I think I'd broadly agree with a 7 out of 10, and this game is another example of what I want from media- as long as I'm entertained, I'm not going to be too upset with a lack of new stuff. It's the same with movies. I didn't care that the Hobbit movies had plot holes or weren't exactly in the spirit of Tolkien*, they entertained me.

*of course, I was never a huge fan of the stale low fantasy Tolkien stuff...

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 12:17 am

Prak wrote:Yeah, I played Gat for the requisite two hours for completion, and was disappointed that the end scenario switched to control of him. I think I'd broadly agree with a 7 out of 10, and this game is another example of what I want from media- as long as I'm entertained, I'm not going to be too upset with a lack of new stuff. It's the same with movies. I didn't care that the Hobbit movies had plot holes or weren't exactly in the spirit of Tolkien*, they entertained me.

*of course, I was never a huge fan of the stale low fantasy Tolkien stuff...

I actually found the first Hobbit movie 'so' boring that it made me decide to not watch the rest of them. I do not care about 'spirit' or whatever and as long as the plot holes aren't distracting I'll stomach them. I don't know about the following movies but the first one, I couldn't even find it slightly entertaining.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 4:50 am

Mortal Kombat X next DLC characters announced.

Leatherface
Bo Rai Cho
Lin Kuei Cyborg
Xenomorph

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1wvZZTQzmw

On the one hand, screw common sense by not making Sindel, Baraka, and Rain playable despite them being in the game already.

On the other hand FOIUFHUDFYGFUYFGFG XENOMORPH

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 5:05 am

"Lin Kuei Cyborg"?

Like, just a generic no-name army-builder grunt? Huh.

Darth Rabbitt · Post by **Darth Rabbitt** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 5:06 am

So no Freddy vs. Jason vs. Alien vs. Predator. But close enough.

Agreed on the others, especially regarding Baraka. Baraka was literally the first character I thought of when I was told "each character in this game has multiple fighting styles that are based off of some of their specials, since he literally has fucking retractable swords growing out of his hands. And he appears so little that it's odd they bothered putting him in the game (same goes to Sindel, honestly. Rain appears enough that he does make sense as a character but that's lost by making him unplayable.)

That being said, I've been a sucker for cyborgs since MK3. So 1/2 of the DLC characters are good by me.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 5:25 am

Assuming they mean Robo-Smoke (or Robo-Sub-Zero I guess, thanks MK9!), Sektor and Cyrax, that doesn't sound too bad.
Xenomorph seems pretty cool, and once you've included Predator in a game, it's just good sense.
Leatherface is pretty disappointing. I know they love their cameos by other pop-culture horror things, but until they include Pinhead, there are higher priorities than Leatherface.
Maxus showed me a video of Rain in gameplay, so even though he is actually a joke (wears purple, is called Rain. Purple Rain. That's the joke.) the powerset is pretty cool and unique.

Now admittedly I played MK9 for nostalgia only and won't get X even if it is given a Linux release. But one can still comment on these things.

Darth Rabbitt · Post by **Darth Rabbitt** » Fri Dec 04, 2015 6:02 am

Koumei wrote:Maxus showed me a video of Rain in gameplay, so even though he is actually a joke (wears purple, is called Rain. Purple Rain. That's the joke.) the powerset is pretty cool and unique

Most of the (male, non-cyborg) Palette Swap ninjas were jokes like that.

Reptile was originally a guy that had all of the powers of both Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Blue+Yellow=Green. Most reptiles are green. And in later games he was a literal reptile in a ninja suit.
Noob Saibot = The last names of (Ed) Boon (and John) Tobias (the creators of the game) backwards.
Ermac =Error Macro (based off of a rumor that you could glitch a red ninja into existence in the first game. The creators adopted him as an actual character in UMK3)
Chameleon = color changing Reptile, also from UMK3
and of course Rain is a Prince reference, again from UMK3. Fun fact: UMK3 spawned a fuckton of palette swap ninjas.

And a lot of them ended up with the most interesting power sets of the later characters (Noob with shadow stuff, Ermac with telekinesis, etc.)