Decline PS4 wins the console war against XboxONE, yet it is a hollow victory as Consolesdämmerung is upon us

A herve caen who knew how to run away with his paycheck.

 

Fixed, console systems are a transition phase betwix Arcade games and PC games, while not exceeling in neither. All console classics can be played on a superior PC provided you can emulate it, and while Arcade games can be played on PC too, the pay-to-credit social enviromnent of Arcades is absent from the premises, unless you LARP.

 

apperently if you have bloated bureaucracy and bigger marketing budget than game dev budget you need sell more than 4-5 mln units to have reasonable influx of cash for company.

I can't wait for crash. With new gen and again increasing dev cost of AAA games it is certain soon we will reach point where biggest pubs will fail.


Factorio devs said that considering their team size they will earn same amount of money as Starcraft 2 literally selling in ten thousands rather than milions.
Probably soon more developers will realize that it is more profitable to work with smaller team of people.

 

Bloated corporate bureaucracy plus high Western pay and benefits plus expensive bullshit like constant flights and parties plus employees spending half the day bullshitting on twitter and playing ping-pong plus plus plus plus

 

That's one of my greatest hopes. Another video game crash (too bad we missed the 30 year anniversary), that resets the industry and brings sanity back into game development. But knowing how things are know, I think we'd mostly see more Goat simulators, DayZ clones and stuff like Papers Please rather than good games.

 

Maybe crash will help rid the industry of its obsession of trying to be New Hollywood. Trying to emulate Hollywood on things Hollywood can do for a faction of the price. I saw Grand Budapest Hotel the other day. Miles ahead of any AAA video game visually (in terms of taste and artistry) and narratively, imo. $500 million on Destiny? For what? To shoot at other players with generic sci-fi guns in a derivative (for anyone who sees a lot of concept art portfolios, at least) sci-fi world, and probably no better than has been done before, with an MMO gimmick that will probably not be that big of a deal in the big picture of video game design. But them production values tho!

 

You think those three are the problem? Really?

 

The idea that you would motion capture a real life human actor so you can animate a character in a video game seems so mindbogglingly stupid to me. Until you can make realistic facial expressions with code cheaply, you should just forget about it, especially since most of that budget goes to stuff cut scenes rather than actually benefiting the gameplay. They should bring back FMV cutcsenes if they want to try to emulate Hollywood so badly. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but seeing real life actors on top of gameplay footage in games like Wing Commander (and other mech/space sim games), Tex Murphy and Noctropolis was actually kind of neat imo. It was stupid and declined the adventure genre (GK2) from beautiful 2D visuals, but I wouldn't mind it so much if it's tastefully done. Maybe if developers were trying to make games like Quake rather than Half Life, then we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

I went this over in another post a month ago or so so I cba to reiterate my opinion more elaborately, but pretentious indygames and pointless sandbox games don't require any game design finesse and are ultimately pointless or lacking in actual gameplay. I want games like Thief&Deus Ex on PC and Radiant Silvergun&Klonoa on consoles like back in the 90s, almost none of the indy shit that's flooding Steam looks competently designed.

 

We need back the middle-budgeted games meant for certain audience group instead of just miniscule budget indie games and massive AAA+++ titles. The New Hollywood obsession is ridiculous, and one of the causes is IMO that new devs don't really know any other types of games. Part of the problem/reason why there's no great visual- or art style is that graphics are done in 3D, I noticed it long time ago that games done in 3D, in both first and third person, is apparently almost impossible to make look good artistically due the technology/technique.

For game to have great visual style, it really needs to be done in 2D because 3D looks too sterile - just compare point'n'click adventure games from the 90s done in 2D and adventure games done today with 3D.

 

Mostly technique imo. I've seen some stunning graphic art and animation done with 3D programs (so much so that a 2D grognard like me is learning Maya and 3DSMax), in 3D space, and they didn't rely on bleeding edge animation, texture, and lighting. But it requires more conceptual vision than "post apocalypse with zombies" or "Forgotten Realms wannabe."

I have a bit higher opinion of recent indie games than that, but we may be on the cusp of reaching that point. Routine, Statis, hopefully Mighty No. 9, Yatagarasu, Hellraid.

 

I think kickstarter campaigns like Mighty no 9, Star Citizen and Torment Tides of Numenera aren't really indy games the same way cheap DL only games made by 20 somethings for iOS/Steam are. Indy games have become synonymous with the kind of games that have taken over PC gaming over the last 3-4 years, after some well designed indy games like Super Meat Boy became popular at the turn of the decade.

 

Oh no, I wasn't aligning them with cheap indy games, but with the core, middle-market or whatever you want to call the games you mentioned. All those games have a degree of presentation that the indy games don't have, while not being lowest common denominator, easy-mode budget busters (hopefully). Routine looks comparable to what SS2 was in its day, Statis is a graphically sumptuous adventure game, Yatagarasu is a (probably) technical fighting game done by veterans, with pro quality 2D animation, etc.

The indy games I have a higher opinion of are like Project Zomboid, Rimworld, Hotline Miami, Gunpoint.

 

Agree and brofist, however improvements in engine licensing, middleware and other such shit are going to make what was "middle-tier" not long ago the new indie standard. It's only a matter of time. Look at No Man's Sky, that fucking thing is being made by like 5 people. Even years ago a game like Zeno Clash was made by a small group of South Americans in a basement. Not all small team indie shit is going to look like Paper's Please forever. Eventually we're going to get our indie Morrowind/Deus Ex/Quake 2, just like we're getting our indie Baldur's Gate now.

 

I love Wes Anderson, in fact he might be one of my favorite directors and has directed one of my favorite movies and every one of them oozes his very specific charm, but I didn't particularly think Grand Budapest was one of his best, especially because it was somewhat overplayed by the actors and overstated (epitomized by the many needless cameos of "star actors" that seemed out of place). Enjoyed Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom and Life Aquatic a lot more. If you haven't seen them and liked this so much you probably should.

I also don't know for what purpose you are comparing a 100 minutes long movie that people will likely pay and see once to an MMO that is supposed to keep people occupied for hundreds of hours and make them come back for recurring payments. You do realize, that while there might not exactly be that much "artistry" behind it (which is likely also for marketing reasons) there is a whole lot more work and sheer content behind it, right? And that filming something is entirely different from having to design a whole world that players will be able to explore and interact with?

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-25-how-no-mans-sky-stole-the-show-at-e3

 

7 is still an amazingly low number making that game. And it's only going to get easier.

 

Let's save the praise until they actually release a working game with even half the features they promised.

You can likely get away with having smaller teams as tools improve, but a game with lots of content (like BG2 or Morrowind) is realistically going to require a lot of manhours regardless. Maybe you cut it down from a dev team of 50 over two years two a dev team of 30 over the same time period, but that's still way beyond your typical indie, and likely well beyond the self-financing capabilities of most independent developers.

We better hope Divinity: Original Sin sells well, as it's pretty much the first real attempt at exactly this.

 

You're right, it's not relevant comparison to the kind of thing I was commenting on. Just a stream of consciousness thing because of the ridiculous amount of money Activision is supposedly spending. They're not trying to offer a cinemajestic experience. But nothing I've seen or heard about the game looks like it's worth the amount of money they are spending. I don't pay attention to MMO budgets, so maybe that's the norm now. Not impressed.

And my favorite Anderson film is probably Life Aquatic, followed by Fantastic Fox and Moonrise Kingdom. I haven't seen Darjeeling.

 

That's where middleware comes into the picture. No Man's Sky is basically a set of algorithms and assets that form worlds automatically. Will that ever have the quality of a hand-placed world? No, but there's probably a happy compromise in there somewhere. Also Deus Ex is much more doable, and surprisingly small all things considered.

 

And nevertheless, games like BG2 had some dreadful tools that could be improved upon, which will still give you a magnitude's more productivity.

 

Again, wait until it actually releases before praising the technology. Procedural world generation as a base for handcrafted content isn't anything new, fucking Bethesda did it with Oblivion. And I don't believe even for a second that the procedural generation on NMS is going to result in anything but endless reskins of the same base assets.

 

Of course it will, but that doesn't mean the game won't be good. Depends on what you want to get out of it and how well the system is set up. I'm not saying NMS is going to be a great game, who knows, I am saying the technology is there for indie games that look like Deus Ex, not Papers Please.

 

Imagine the next Final Fantasy being an Android exclusive.