Wow, the stench of bigotry is so strong I think I can detect it wafting from my Ethernet port. If you’re going to be that holier-than-thou, presumptive and downright bloody-minded, Geoffrey, then this thread may as well be locked. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy - you complain about the lack of gamers in companies today, and yet you take absolutely no measures to ensure that those gamers can be reintroduced? Superb logic there. http://www.proboards8.com/v4images/rolleyes.gif
Did you read anything of my two posts beyond that point? The ‘golden era’ you’re envisaging before the pernicious “men in suits” came never existed! Go back and have a proper look at them. Another point to add to the ones stated in them is your petulant whinge that the success of Fable is derived from it being “hyped up from Lionhead Studios and M$ from its very inception”. Hype’s nothing new, Geoffrey. Allow me to go back to Sonic (again), the figure who defeated Nintendo in Round 3 of the Console Wars. He was relentlessly hyped up higher than Everest. Remember the Blast Technology chip? Or Sonic 2’sday? Two cartoon series? Branded wellington boots? Themed spaghetti? Sega (and, as I say again, the architect of the high-quality games we all know and love) embraced mainstream marketability. All games companies need to pay attention to the ‘casual gamer’, otherwise they’ll fold in seconds - and that seems rather pointless. That ‘casual gamer’ is something symptomatic of the very fundamentals of our society, and so we can’t hope to change them. We must then ensure that there’s still respect for art in the games companies themselves. Your sulkiness isn’t doing anything to affect that.
But it is very difficult to make an action game, where you control multiple characters at once. That’s why story driven party based RPGs like Shining Force can not easily be translated into an action game without loosing something essential their core idea. [/quote]
A good story doens’t need a party.But it is possible to introduce a party system in an Action RPG.It might have not been done but it’s possible.
Just something I’d like to say concerning ARPG’s : I honestly only played a real Action RPG once(you’ve guesses it Fable) but I do think it has a lot of untapped potential.Why do I say that?Because quite frankly I’m not a fan of levlling-up" just because" and normally RPG’s have boring combat gameplay.It’s just like PD.I liked PDSaga’s system very much but if there could be a shooter/RPG in the series I’d be thrilled.It’s the best of both worlds in a game.In my opinion of course.
[quote=“Abadd”]Because yes, developers get bored doing the same thing over and over. But, if you were a publisher, why wouldn’t you just take both? You’ve got a successful franchise and a developer who has proved they could deliver the goods. You’ve got your cash cow, let them experiment. That’s exactly what I’ve been saying.
You’ve been saying that the cash cow has no value. I’m saying that the cash cow is what gives developers the freedom to experiment.[/quote]
But when experimenting costs so damn much, and there’s no guarantees of success, why bother? Why not just let someone else take the gamble and then buy them out when that gamble pays off a la EA? It’s much less costly that way.
Hehe. Sorry if I’m going around in circles now. I’m just trying to understand the mentality behind all of this. If making as much money as possible was the only goal here, then we all know what the consquences will be. Satisfying mass market needs at the expense of everything else seems to be the name of this game.
[quote=“Abadd”]Replace Miyamoto with Will Wright, Sid Meier, Peter Molixneuxudweanoigzx (never could spell his name), etc and it’s the exact same thing. It takes a certain level of genius to be able to pull off something that weird. And until someone proves they can take an idea and make it into something good, that idea is worth nothing. There are a million ideas a day… the trick is to learn which ones to bet on.
And similarities to Pokemon???[/quote]
They share some aesthetic similarities etc.
So basically, you need a track record of success to pull something untested off? And by taking an idea and making it good, you mean making a hit with the masses? That’s like saying all RPGs were “worth nothing” until Final Fantasy 7 came along and popularized them.
Sure, make a new Zelda game. Let’s see Nintendo call it something else and then see how far it takes them. Nintendo has the talent and the money to make/market almost any number of new franchises, and yet, Nintendo almost always sticks with a known brand. At this rate, we’ll see Zelda games until the end of time.
[quote=“Abadd”]You gave reasons why those games were successful… but how does that change the fact that they were? And the fact that KOTOR 2 outsold KOTOR 1 should prove that it wasn’t just Bioware. Sure, the Star Wars license helped give it a boost, but it’s the best selling Star Wars game of all time, I believe. It was the hook to bring gamers in, and the quality of the game is what kept the sales going.
And this isn’t an isolated case of this kind of game doing well. I gave you 2 others, both of which you gave excuses for… but 3 games, all topping 1 million units, doesn’t constitute a pattern for you?[/quote]
The Star Wars name was the hook that drew them in nonetheless. I’d love to think that those games sold because they were genuinely good and gave all types of gamers the fix they were searching for (to a large extent that’s true for Morrowind). But if you can only make a great game over the safety net of a popular brandname (KOTOR was basically Baldur’s Gate set in the Star Wars universe), then it speaks volumes about how discerning your average gamer really is.
A trusted brand, no matter how popular and trustworthy, shouldn’t automatically be associated with quality. Ask anyone who bought Devil May Cry 2. Shouldn’t a title be indicative of the theme and setting of a game? It’s almost as if people don’t have time to inform themselves on what games they should spend 40-50 dollars/pounds on (which is a lot of money to me), so they just gravitate towards a recogniseable name.
KOTOR deserved to sell out, while KOTOR 2 did not. We all know many planned elements of KOTOR 2 were cut out to meet a Christmas 2004 deadline. The game was rushed out because Lucas Arts knew it would sell regardless of being incomplete. That’s a prime example of a publisher that’s more concerned about making a quick buck than releasing a finished, quality product. The creators of Planecape: Torment did do a good job with the game in the time alloted to them, but the game simply wasn’t all it could have been. Strip it of the Star Wars liscence and then let everyone know that the game is incomplete, and I doubt it would have sold even half as well. You’d think that’s what the gaming press was for. Basically, although KOTOR 2 was a good game in its own right, to a great extent it was riding on the success of the first game.
I agree though, that all the elements seen in BioWare’s RPGs (i.e. romances, strategic party-based real-time combat et al) provide all the fun a lot of gamers will ever need. BioWare/Interplay opened up a new market with Baldur’s Gate, and BioWare have refined the gameplay since then rather than let it go stale. However… those games are still very combat-driven. Where Torment had lots of branching stat-influenced dialogue punctuated by party-based combat, the very opposite was true for Baldur’s Gate (with dialogue not being nearly as deep as it could have been and with the main focus being combat). KOTOR walked a very fine line between gameplay suitable for casual and non-casual players alike. There’s a reason why every single line of dialogue was voice-acted.
Where does SF Neo fit into all of this? That certainly wasn’t made for hardcore long-time Sega fans.
But like I wrote earlier, if you’re limited to innovating only in ways the casual masses can understand, that means you can’t innovate in ways that they might not. That all boils down to taste, and IMHO, a lot of casual gamers have very poor taste in games. It’s a shame hardcore gamers aren’t numerous enough to guide the industry anymore.
If it can be done, I’m all for it. Bridging that gap is something Sega should strive to do. Still, we’ve seen developers/publishers focus less on lessening that gap, and more on pleasing those whom spend the most money. Why can’t there be a balance?
Sulkiness? Bringing games to the masses was the best and worst thing that ever could have happened to them. Watching the traversty of an RPG that was Final Fantasy X sell 6 million copies while more fulfilling RPGs went unnoticed this generation was agonizing to say the least. If you want more games companies to follow in EA’s footsteps by catering to these “gamers” exclusively, that’s your prerogative.
If Sega made Shenmue 3, PD Saga 2 etc etc, then you might have a point. However… the games industry doesn’t run on dreams alone. It runs on money. If that ever changes, let me know. Games companies aren’t going to throw money away catering to niche audiences. This very topic is about innovating in ways the masses can understand, and in some cases, trying to appeal to both hardcore and mainstream crowds by mainstreaming (i.e. simplifying etc) less marketable ideas.
Face it: the industry has been taken over by casual gamers, and no one cares about what you want. It’s like the lack of funding being poured into medical cures for AIDs etc: there’s no money to be made in complete cures (most drugs are made to alleviate symptoms). People should fund them for no other reason than because it’s the right thing to do. Too bad nobody cares.
Graaaah! I wrote up an entire response, only to accidently hit the exact sequence of keys to close the damn window.
In essence, I said: great discussion!
But, in response to Geoffrey’s recent post:
Who said making as much money as possible was the “only” goal? You seem to be ignoring a statement I’ve said numerous times. The only solid way to continually grow your business is to earn the trust of your consumer, which can only be accomplished through consistent quality.
And will you get off the whole black or white thing? “Satisfying market needs at the expense of everything…” wtf is that? Did you not read what I said about trying to bridge the gap between casual and hardcore consumers? Why is it a game has to be OMGWTFPWNZOR for the hardcore, or has to be completely stupid tripe for the casual?
You experiment because you are trying to grow your business. EA has the “luxury” of being able to buy developers because of its huge cash flow, but most publishers do not. So, you let trustworthy developers take risks. Using your example from earlier, MSR was only a small risk in relative terms. It tried something new in the racing genre, but it was still a racing game, something Bizarre had proven they could do. Controlled risk.
When trying to pull off something untested that requires tens of millions of dollars of investment, yes, it helps to have a lot of experience under your belt. I “good” idea is maybe 10% of an entire project. It’s the key starting point. But, if you don’t know how to select your team, if you don’t know how to manage them, if you don’t know how to control your risks… you could have the greatest idea in the world, but your idea will never see the light of day, guaranteed. THAT’S what I mean by “good.” You could have the best. idea. evar. but unless you know how to actually make that idea into a product, your idea is worth less than the free cup of coffee I just had.
Again, I fail to see why Nintendo is wrong in doing that. Why is it wrong for them to make a new Zelda game, and call it a Zelda game? How does that lessen the intrinsic value of that product? If you enjoy a game less simply because of the brand attached, then perhaps it is you who has the issue? If you are preventing yourself from enjoying a perfectly good game just because of the name, then perhaps you need to take a step back and think about what it is about games you actually do enjoy.
If you are an average gamer that doesn’t spend hours a day on the internet looking up information on games, what do you expect them to do? There are two key issues with games right now: the price, and the time investment. You expect someone to plop down $50 and then invest 40 hours of their time into a product that they know nothing about?
With a brand like Star Wars, you bring more than a simple label. You bring a whole rich canon to the game, and you create a bridge to the average consumer. You mitigate your risk as a publisher, and the consumer’s risk, without sacrificing an ounce of quality.
Sure, a brand isn’t a guarantee for quality, but you think an internet review is? A fanboy saying, “OMG this game is 4tw!!!1!” will convince the average person to purchase a game? And as I mentioned earlier, people don’t have time to look up every single game on the shelf. There are hundreds of games out at any point.
You have failed to show how this is a bad thing.
As for KOTOR2, yes, the polish on the game suffered. But I guarantee you that if you did not know about the cut features, you wouldn’t care one bit. The only thing that mattered in this case was the presence of bugs. All RPGs of that size suffer from an enormous amount of bugs, but KOTOR2 was ever worse. That being said, the game was still extremely fun, and lived up to the expectations of the fans (bugs aside). You can’t simply “strip away the license” because the damn game was built around the license.
SF Neo is simply a single drop in the bucket. Does every RPG game need to be a KOTOR?
One minute, you’re talking about bridging the gap between hardcore and casual gamers. Now you’re saying that you can’t. Which is it?
And to be honest, if all we had were hardcore gamers, the interactive medium would never reach its full potential. We’d never move beyond games created in the 16 bit era, because hardcore gamers have a tendency to become too entrenched in what they are familiar with, and believe it or not, refuse to delineate from that.
Games that you think are innovative like Rez? Shenmue? Even Katamari Damacy? All got their inspirations outside of gaming. It took a non-hardcore gamer to make those innovations.
Oh, and I simply cannot believe you compared the game industry to finding a cure for AIDS. I really can’t.
…Geoffrey, when you decide to read all of my posts and appreciate fully what I’m saying instead of just latching onto individual sentences and speaking out of context, then I’ll consider your response a decent one. As it is, you’re still completely missing the point.
To highlight what I mean by you being sulky, for instance:
[quote]
Wow, the stench of bigotry is so strong I think I can detect it wafting from my Ethernet port. If you’re going to be that holier-than-thou, presumptive and downright bloody-minded, Geoffrey, then this thread may as well be locked. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy - you complain about the lack of gamers in companies today, and yet you take absolutely no measures to ensure that those gamers can be reintroduced? Superb logic there. http://www.proboards8.com/v4images/rolleyes.gif[/quote]
Even worse, you’ve decided to completely misrepresent what I’m saying. Where did I say that casual gamers had to be catered for exclusively? Get your head out of your backside, Geoffrey, I’m genuinely affronted that you see fit to paint me with that, and that your arrogance prevents you from bothering to think about what I’ve written. I said that we can’t ignore casual gamers, and that they’ve always been there, even during the pre-32bit ‘golden era’ (which never existed), and that the reason Sega succeeded was realising a few core brands which had mass-market appeal. That does not preclude more advanced games from being developed. Indeed, it encourages them because with a secure financial foundation developers can afford to take risks (as Sega later went on to do). As Abadd says, if it wasn’t for the causal gamer, we’d never have had Gunstar Heroes, NiGHTS, Burning Rangers, Rez, Shining Force and the rest, as those ventures simply couldn’t be afforded.
Geoffrey, how many people do you think would prefer to watch Coronation Street over Panorama? Have you compared the sizes of an arthouse cinema and a n UCI multiplex? Casual gamers are simply the reflection of the condition of our entire society. The big summer blockbusters will always haul in more cash than the philosophical meditative films - but that doesn’t stop you making the latter! The same applies to computer games. For the THIRD time: Like it or not (and I don’t, but I’m not so foolish as to deny that it’s true), we’ll always have to suffer FIFA. You won’t change that unless you can change the fundamental mindset of entire nations. The way to ensure that advanced, if peripheral, games continue to be made is to ensure that the developer’s ethos remains amenable to it. To do that, you need to actively pursue the agenda of art in the industry, and with each release or example of popular agitation gradually convert people. Futhermore, mass-market games can themselves be good, enjoyable games, if we keep this dedication (e.g. Zelda and Sonic).
All you’d do is moan, whinge, angst and rant about how gaming has died. And then it would die - but only because you’ve done nothing to preserve it.
Sorry for the delay in posting; I was distracted by WoW.
So what’s your point Robert? That we have to cater to casual gamers even if that means we may never see another Shining Force simulation RPG for a home console or a true RPG sequel to Panzer Dragoon Saga? Point taken.
Abadd:
Games should sell purely on merit alone as opposed to using (their) brands as bait to lure in buyers. Now the industry should only innovate by satisfying every unmet need from one passing fad to the next?
And really, do you really not think there’s a distinct difference between casual gamers who won’t give an RPG without the words “Final Fantasy” in the title half a chance (believe me when I say I’ve met people like this), and hardcore gamers who fully embrace games as a hobby and who can truly appreciate games for what they are? It’s a pity the former type of “gamer” is so numerous.
Speaking to your comment to Robert, it was just as much the hardcore gamer’s fault as it was the casual gamer’s fault. There are enough hardcore gamers out there to make some games sell, yet they weren’t interested enough when those games you mentioned came out. In fact, when the original Shining Force and Panzer Saga came out, the industry was still relatively “hardcore,” by your standards. Why didn’t they become mega hits then?
And again with the black and white. All I asked was what was wrong with putting a name that people recognized on a game. I didn’t say it had to be one or the other. Some games do sell based on their merit alone. But how does putting a brand name on it distract from the game if the game truly is a quality title?
And who said that meeting the needs of the audience meant catering to “passing fads”? Are stealth games a passing fad? Games like Thief and MGS brought about an entirely new genre of gaming. One that stuck around. How is that a passing fad?
And again, you generalize. For every casual gamer that will only buy a Final Fantasy game, you’ve got others buying KOTOR. Your point is? And by your comments, you seem to not be able to enjoy games for what they are, but rather, you refuse to enjoy games for anything other than exactly what you want and expect them to be. How is that any better?
I’d really like to see how this could be implemented. I honestly can’t invision anything as tightly controlled as a turn based strategy game… honestly, can you?
Another thing, just because stories don’t need parties in them, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for those kinds of stories in games. In a good RPG, story and gameplay should go together and compliment one another, and I think that there is so much room to expand this in a turn based strategy game. For example, in Shining Force III when you place a character next to another character that it’s friends with, you might get an attack bonus in battle. Implementing a system like that where you could actually plan out positions like that in real time would be extremely confusing for the player… basically what I’m saying is that having AI controlled party members looses some of the “cooperation” based gameplay found in a turn based strategy game. It needs to be turn based to allow the level of control over your army that a game like Shining Force offers to gamers with enough patience to play it.
Landstalker is a great action RPG for the Megadrive, I’d highly recommend trying it out if you get the chance. It features more than just hacking and slashing - plenty of platform jumping and puzzles. Too bad games like Landstalker are rarely made these days.
I enjoyed Fable by the way. It was great for what it was.
You could blame part of Panzer Dragoon Saga’s failure on the fact that Sega didn’t create enough copies to be released outside of Japan. No wonder the game costs so much on eBay. I think if Sega had released more copies in Europe and America, the game would have done better. Also Panzer Dragoon Saga and Shining Force III were released quite late in Saturn’s life, when the Saturn was a dying system. If those games had been released on the Playstation, things could have turned out a lot differently for all we know… we might have even seen Scenarios 2 and 3 in English.
I?m convinced that many of the Playstation owning Final Fantasy VII fans would have taken interest in the FMV-rich Panzer Dragoon Saga if it had appeared on their own console, at any rate.
Had there been an actual demand from retailers, I highly doubt Sega of America would have turned down the orders. It’s most likely that retail simply refused to carry any more copies of a game that was coming out on a dead console. If there was that big of a demand for it, retail would have responded.
As for a party-based system, you’re only thinking in terms of a strategy game. Gehn said action RPG. The whole point of a turn-based strategy game is basically to play an altered form of chess. Two games that come to mind are Star Ocean and KOTOR. Or heck, you could even get as old school as Secret of Mana.
I’m sure that if Sega hadn’t released so few copies of PD Saga on a dying console, or if it had been released for the far, far more popular Playstation instead, the game would have sold much better. By the time PD Saga came out in Japan, the Playstation generation had taken over. A generation of mainly “light users” as Noritaka Funamizu once put it. There always was and always will be casual players, but no one until Sony managed to fully tap into that market. I also don’t think the post-apocalyptic themes of Panzer Dragoon Saga were “culturally relevant” (as you would put it Abadd) in Japan at the time anymore when everyone was clamoring for Final Fantasy.
Shining Force was quite successful in Japan even on the straggling Mega Drive, hence the sequels, side games etc. Sega published those games as viable alternatives to Fire Emblem. The SF III trilogy outsold SF Neo at over a 3:1 ratio in Japan, and sold out when the game was rereleased long after the Saturn’s demise. It’s actually quite tragic that Sega feels there’s no market for these games (on home consoles) anymore. It’s also a pity that Camelot doesn’t work for Sega anymore as a result of the whole SF III debacle, isn’t it? I bet Sega would love to have published Golden Sun.
You make it sound as if a new Shining Force simulation RPG should never, ever be made merely because the demand for it isn’t high enough. Who do we blame for that? I blame a market that doesn’t have the patience for such a game. Why shouldn’t I?
Using brands as bait is all well and good. However, it’s just that when you do it all the time, it restricts you to what people expect from those brands. How Nintendo has managed to keep its old and stale franchises seemingly new and fresh is beyond me. Nintendo can afford to branch out by experimenting with more new franchises, yet refuses to do so. That has always been Nintendo’s greatest strength and single most greatest flaw.
Like I said, KOTOR is both casual and hardcore gamer-friendly (with plenty of limited party-based real-time combat to keep people glued to their screens, interactive voice-acted characters, romances, limited stat or alignment-influenced branching dialogue etc), which is exactly what BioWare was aiming for. It walks a very fine line between casual and hardcore realms. Isn’t that something more developers should strive for? Take away the voice acting (as well as perhaps even the obligitary damsel in distress), and throw in lots more text, and casual gamers would shy away from it either before or after falling for the popular Stars Wars brand. Guaranteed. I have even been witness to people complaining about the battle system not being an exact carbon copy of what we see in Final Fantasy.
While it is true that we have always had corporate entities in gaming the difference is that the men in suits let the games division do what they did and they just did what needed to be done on the other end. sony not only has there hands on everything that they produce but they have specifically tried to kill several genres in the video games field just to satisfy there profit margin. I don’t remember anything like that ever happening during Atari’s,Nintendo’s or Sega’s regin. The difference was that these companies actually cared about making a better game. all sony cared about was lining their pockets and cashining in on franchise,franchise,franchise while stopping any new originality that appered on the scene. this “golden age” is the most immoral,shallow and soul destroying i have ever experienced.
Like Abadd said;KOTOR is a perfect example of a game that could be converted to Action RPG and not lose the party story development part.Your party would fight by themselves when you were controlling your character but that wouldn’t mean you couldn’t simply switch characters in the middle of combat and control another guy.
Some very cool combo system could be thought up using the siwtching between characters actually.
I would just like to ponit out that the reaosn I only play one Action RPG isn’t because I only like Fable as an ARPG.I just don’t know that many titles.But I heard about Landstalker.Never tried it out unfortunately.
I assumed we were talking about Shining Force, since Gehn quoted my point that Shining Force-like games could not be easily turned into action games. My mistake.
But anyway, if we’re talking about party based games in general, then yes I agree that turn based party games can pretend to be action games to a certain extent. I haven’t played Star Ocean, so I can’t comment on that system, but KOTOR is a good example of a turn based game that “flows” closer to an action game, than say, Phantasy Star (the Megadrive games, not PSO), and yet still remains a party-based system.
However, In KOTOR, while you have full control of all your characters actions, those actions aren’t executed by the player in real time (like in Fable for example), they’re selected through a menu system and then you watch your characters attack. I personally wouldn’t class this as an action RPG, as there are still dice rolls, etc, going on underneath. Using the Fable example again, a combat based on both skill and stats, as opposed to KOTOR where the combat is based on strategy and stats, but not so much how quick the player’s reactions are.
This isn’t all the different to other semi real time battle systems like Final Fantasy, except that in KOTOR you are able to move one character at a time, whereas in Final Fantasy your characters don’t move at all. Now if we go back to what I was saying about Shining Force, here is the problem: in KOTOR if you’re moving one character, you cannot move any of the others at the same time as you could in a game like Shining Force, because the battle still continues while you are moving the selected character. In this way, you will never get the same precise strategy that you could in a turn based strategy game. Up the number of playable characters in battle at a time to twelve and you’re going to have a hard time moving and keeping track of all those characters at once. You’d have to pause the battle and select different moves and positions for the secondary characters, effectively turning the battle system back into a turn based one instead of a real time one.
[quote=“Gehn”]Like Abadd said;KOTOR is a perfect example of a game that could be converted to Action RPG and not lose the party story development part.Your party would fight by themselves when you were controlling your character but that wouldn’t mean you couldn’t simply switch characters in the middle of combat and control another guy.
Some very cool combo system could be thought up using the siwtching between characters actually.[/quote]
I personally think that a game like KOTOR could work decently in real time because you’re generally only manipulating three characters at once, but you have to admit that you’d lose some of the control over the other characters in your party because you couldn’t queue moves (those actions aren’t truly real time after all). Something like Jade Empire’s real time battle system (I haven’t played it, I’m just basing this on what I’ve heard of the game) combined with the ability to switch between characters in the heat of battle could work quite well, but what if you wanted two of your characters to attack the same target? The battle system would need to be quite complex in order to summon the secondary characters to do what you wanted them to do. They’d most likely either have to be controlled by AI, or preprogrammed, which would mean that those characters would not be controlled in real time. The only other way of doing it that I can think of is having some additional button combination to control secondary characters while still maintaining control of the primary character… if that’s the case, I challenge you to come up with a battle system where you could control twelve characters in real time at once with a single controller.
Well when I mentioned a KOTOR-like ARPG I dind’t mean you could control your party while you were hacking’nslashing/shooting.They would pretty much attack like they do in Kotor.But turning it into a bit of SRPG when paused would definately be a cool feature.
In that case, don’t you think a game like that ceases to be a party-based system, if you don’t have direct control over other characters in your party? Doesn’t that lessen the appeal of having those characters in your party, for you?
But, what I mean is, you can’t control all of those characters at once. You lose control of the secondary characters once the AI takes over. To me, that seems a step backwards in terms of control.
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