Games are expensive because players are trolls

[Erzherzog]

One of my favorite games was Men of War. WW2 strategy focusing on vehicles.

It had realistic tank physics. A teammate of mine mastered the art of hitting a tank at such an angle that it would deflect into a weaker tank that was out of his range. killing the weak tank.

Men of War is a budget series. AAA developers are just idiots is all. Interactivity and emergent gameplay are actually quite easy when you don't railroad the player.

 

[Dexter]

 

[Angthoron]

I'd also like to see that world interactivity. Cause I like don't. Think it was in Dishonored that I shot at a lamp and it didn't break. Ah, I thought, stealth game. How far we've come. So interactive. So dynamic.

Exactly, that's what I mean, there's none of this interactivity this guy keeps ranting about.
Sure, a few games advertise destructive environments (Red Faction, are there others?), and some have slightly more interactive light sources or more clutter objects that can be picked up or thrown around, but that's it.
However, nothing of this is done in significantly more detail or quantity than 10 or 15 years ago (probably with the exception of destructible environments, but I haven't actually played Red Faction, so far).

Well, in RF you had weapons that could destroy much of the level. Destroy almost any wall, shoot through closed doors with a rail gun, take a rocket launcher and tunnel your way through the level as long as the ammo is enough. It was pretty cool. There's some shooters with destructible scenery, but most of them are actually multiplayer shooters, so again, it goes completely against his point - players actually WANT those walls to explode, they WANT that tree to fall, they WANT alternative routes and tactics. They don't want the designer to flip them off and tell them "Soz, too expensive, here, have a straight line with much scripts". In fact, even on-the-rails shooters provide pseudo-interactivity, where the player hits a trigger and a cutscene has that skyscraper go boom or such. Except in the end scripting 60 such cutscenes is going to be more expensive than just making a working physics engine that you can then add to ALL your future games and have the player do the destruction instead.

RF: Guerilla does some of that nicely. It's a very mediocre GTA-like, but you can break down skyscrapers if you wanted to, or collapse bridges if that's how you decide to solve a mission. Why Volition, a very shakily A-studio at the time, afforded to do this, but not the "genuine" AAA groups? Why? Why?

 

[Erzherzog]

Same reason why so many "a" or "b" developers succeed where indie and AAA developer fail, sheer efficiency and focus. It's obvious that a small but decently funded studio that obtains certain assets from outside the company do well.

For example, Factor 5 provided a ton of behind the scenes extras in their release of Rogue Squadron 2 where they mention several times accomplishing something by buying it from an external developer...as minute as the sand texture on the Tattooine levels.

But micromanagement gonna micromanagement.

 

[Commissar Draco]

X-Com Terror from the Deep has full destructible enviroments, games weight 10 MB and needs 8 MB of RAM. AAA developers are just lazy cunts.