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Remember how the very first Marvel vs game just had Street Fighter characters? Well, the same, but all Ace Attorney characters.
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Sep 23, 2017 04:37
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Waffleman_ posted:Remember how the very first Marvel vs game just had Street Fighter characters? They'd have to change it from VS to v.
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Sep 23, 2017 04:47
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Also the only people on the Marvel side are Matt and Jen and also it's not a fighting game, but an actual Ace Attorney game.
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Sep 23, 2017 04:51
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Aphrodite posted:Capcom also hasn't made a good successful game in a long time so they can't afford to do anything new. Like literally can't afford. There's a lot of Internet telephone going on with Capcom. It's done some incredibly unpopular things over the course of the last decade or so, which has made a lot of their fans inclined to think the worst of the company. Anything that could possibly be interpreted as bad news has been. The actual numbers tell a dramatically different story. Most of the games the company has released for the last five years or so have been at least mild successes, even the ones that you'd think would have bombed, such as the Ninja Theory reboot of Devil May Cry. Capcom has been firmly in the black throughout, and while its release schedule has slowed to a virtual crawl, its biggest modern problem is that it isn't as profitable as it would like to be. Much like Hollywood financiers, Capcom bases its performance on sales projections that have traditionally been wildly optimistic. What appears to be the case for Marvel vs. Capcom in particular was that the company's internal resources were almost entirely devoted to the forthcoming Monster Hunter World, which is likely to at least take over Japan and likely several points beyond. Infinite was thus put together by a B-team in a relative hurry, using Unreal Engine 4 rather than Capcom's typical in-house engine, and in all respects but its actual play, it shows. Lurdiak posted:No I mean like, that were recently created and became successful franchises. Street Fighter is 30 goddamn years old. Not many companies have the wherewithal to create successful franchises out of whole cloth right now. Capcom's most recent original success might be Dragon's Dogma. Then again, rule #1 of a big video game crossover is always going to be that you go with all the hits. This is also a really silly point to bring up in conjunction with a Marvel crossover, of all things. The only Marvel character on the roster who isn't at least 30 years old is Venom, and then, only barely. Maybe the Winter Soldier, depending on your interpretation.
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Sep 23, 2017 05:44
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And yet they can't get arsed to make a DMC5
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Sep 23, 2017 05:55
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Dark_Tzitzimine posted:And yet they can't get arsed to make a DMC5 It's not so much about what they can or cannot be arsed to do; the director of DMC4 is still with Capcom and there's been a rumor of a DMC5 announcement every year for the last couple of years. Capcom tried to spread out its licenses among a number of third-party developers in the early 2010s in order to accelerate its release schedule, which ended poorly, with games like Lost Planet 3. In the wake of the PR failure of Resident Evil 6, they publicly committed to reorganizing the company so most of their projects would be produced in-house. Then Nintendo jumped the gun on starting the eighth console generation, which no third-party company was really prepared for. (There's a reason why most of the releases for the PS4 and Xbone for the first year or two were "HD remasters.") Making a PS4 or Xbone game is expensive, which has been a serious problem; it's why Konami stepped back from the console market, for example. It does mean that most third-party developers are taking absolutely no risks right now, which is part of why you're seeing such an influx of high-profile creators into indie productions and Kickstarter projects. tl;dr: your favorite developer did not abandon your favorite franchise because of laziness or carelessness. It is probably because they need to mind their bottom line at the moment.
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Sep 23, 2017 06:04
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I said good successful. They have successes, but they're not good. Yes I mean Monster Hunter is bad. Fight me. I'll be in 2017 while you're still doing janky rear end 2003 animations and have to resort to invincibility frames.
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Sep 23, 2017 06:17
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Samuringa posted:Drogma's winning quotes are all Pawn Dialogue.
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Sep 23, 2017 06:24
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Aphrodite posted:Yes I mean Monster Hunter is bad. Fight me. I'll be in 2017 while you're still doing janky rear end 2003 animations and have to resort to invincibility frames. I don't much care for the franchise either, but you and I appear to be outnumbered by--[looks out windows, counts heads, does math]--the entire population of the Japanese archipelago.
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Sep 23, 2017 06:25
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Aphrodite posted:I said good successful. They have successes, but they're not good. I can't think of any major action franchise on the planet that doesn't use invincibility frames. Even Dark Souls has i-frames.
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Sep 23, 2017 06:33
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Wanderer posted:I don't much care for the franchise either, but you and I appear to be outnumbered by--[looks out windows, counts heads, does math]--the entire population of the Japanese archipelago. All it took last time was one fat man and one little boy. I'm neither but I figure I have at least the combat prowess of a small child. You better bulk up.
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Sep 23, 2017 06:49
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Hasn't Capcom's success making money off pachinko and mobile gaming been diverting their attention away from traditional video gaming a bit? Obviously nowhere near the level of Konami, but that probably factors in at least a bit.
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Sep 23, 2017 06:57
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I was unaware of this. I didn't know that the graphical and technological upgrades made games prohibitively expensive to make. I never expected the industry to advance itself into a dire situation. It's fascinating and away.
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Sep 23, 2017 07:31
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Lightning Lord posted:Hasn't Capcom's success making money off pachinko and mobile gaming been diverting their attention away from traditional video gaming a bit? Obviously nowhere near the level of Konami, but that probably factors in at least a bit. They have been doing that sort of thing for as long as they've been a company. Resident Evil alone has several pachinko machines, several cell phone games, a theme restaurant, an amusement park ride, three animated movies that got theatrical releases, a clothing line, several different high-end toy lines, a licensed brand of airsoft pistols, and a trading card game. They've been diversified to hell and gone for decades and it's never slowed them down. Zoro posted:I was unaware of this. I didn't know that the graphical and technological upgrades made games prohibitively expensive to make. I never expected the industry to advance itself into a dire situation. It's fascinating and away. It's not something that a lot of people talk about, but yeah. Games development is extremely time-consuming, which makes it expensive on its own (a million dollars in game development is basically equal to hiring eight people for one year, when a modern triple-A game could easily employ two hundred people for two to five years), and the costs of developing on high-end hardware can be fairly extreme. You also have to add in costs such as a full orchestra with the associated personnel, a crew of voice actors and their director, and the basic expense of running an office for and employing hundreds of people, especially since many game publishers tend to be at least partially headquartered in some of what's become the most expensive real estate on Earth. As I mentioned above, Nintendo also dropped a bomb on the games industry by releasing the Wii-U when they did, which effectively started the eighth console generation "early." A lot of people would've preferred that the PS3/360 get another couple of years of operational life, but Sony and Microsoft had to leap into the breach. A lot of Japanese developers in particular were in no way prepared for the associated costs of developing on a brand-new, next-generation platform. It's one of the reasons why a lot of modern games tend to be focus-grouped to hell and back, and why everyone is somewhat gun-shy about starting new mainstream franchises. It's also the knock-on cause of a lot of different issues, like why the generic video game protagonist is a 25 to 34-year-old brown-haired white guy with an anger disorder, or why it was a super hard sell for a while to make a big game with a female protagonist.
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Sep 23, 2017 08:08
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Wanderer posted:They have been doing that sort of thing for as long as they've been a company. Resident Evil alone has several pachinko machines, several cell phone games, a theme restaurant, an amusement park ride, three animated movies that got theatrical releases, a clothing line, several different high-end toy lines, a licensed brand of airsoft pistols, and a trading card game. They've been diversified to hell and gone for decades and it's never slowed them down. Yeah, but those other enterprises seem to be increasing in profitability and less sunk costs like you talk about in the rest of your post in comparison to console and computer gaming in general in Japan, which might be leading them to invest more resources into it. Since it all probably has a better rate of return, some staff might get transferred, etc. This isn't a bad thing, it's just them responding to the market. Just something to keep in mind regarding things like B-teams getting assigned to projects.
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Sep 23, 2017 08:44
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Lightning Lord posted:Yeah, but those other enterprises seem to be increasing in profitability and less sunk costs like you talk about in the rest of your post in comparison to console and computer gaming in general in Japan, which might be leading them to invest more resources into it. Since it all probably has a better rate of return, some staff might get transferred, etc. This isn't a bad thing, it's just them responding to the market. Just something to keep in mind regarding things like B-teams getting assigned to projects. Mobile gaming development and console/PC gaming development generally do not share personnel, as I understand it. Mobile gaming is a massively profitable enterprise in Japan, and Capcom has dipped its toes into it, but the company still primarily regards itself as a console developer. The point of my reply is that the company has had multiple sidelines as long as it has existed and it's never created a bottleneck that's obvious from outside the company. What we do know about how it's been allocating resources is compelling enough that we don't need to speculate about the effects of whatever mobile division it has at the moment.
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Sep 23, 2017 08:50
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You're probably thinking of Konami, who I believe always had a gambling division but have now turned over popular franchises like Metal Gear and Castlevania to making sexy new pachislot machines rather than, like, normal video games, such as you play if you are not gambling.
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Sep 23, 2017 10:16
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Aphrodite posted:All it took last time was one fat man and one little boy. Love to advocate genocide because a country likes a video game I don't. That's a thing a healthy person does.
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Sep 23, 2017 17:36
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Nessus posted:You're probably thinking of Konami, who I believe always had a gambling division but have now turned over popular franchises like Metal Gear and Castlevania to making sexy new pachislot machines rather than, like, normal video games, such as you play if you are not gambling. That isn't quite correct. Konami has scaled back their game production (though they still have a new Metal Gear game coming out) but it isn't either/or. Castlevania and Metal Gear pachinko games were coming out even when they were releasing games. It isn't either/or.
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Sep 23, 2017 17:38
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MGS and Castlevania fans in Japan loving hate the pachinko too, because while pachinko in the west is just some thing we'll never get, in Japan it's understood as basically being exclusively for olds, so the fans in Japan are more directly being ignored.
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Sep 23, 2017 17:42
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Waffleman_ posted:MGS and Castlevania fans in Japan loving hate the pachinko too, because while pachinko in the west is just some thing we'll never get, in Japan it's understood as basically being exclusively for olds, so the fans in Japan are more directly being ignored. From my understanding, Pachinko is basically their equivalent to our one-arm bandits, slot machines. But, this all just begs the question. If game development is so expensive that people are going into gambling instead, why not just make games that are cheaper? Couldn't you just lower the production values and save money? Not all games need to be 4K Ultra HD on my loving God games. They could be intentionally retro graphics.
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Sep 23, 2017 19:31
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Zoro posted:From my understanding, Pachinko is basically their equivalent to our one-arm bandits, slot machines. But, this all just begs the question. If game development is so expensive that people are going into gambling instead, why not just make games that are cheaper? Couldn't you just lower the production values and save money? Not all games need to be 4K Ultra HD on my loving God games. They could be intentionally retro graphics. The problem is that gamers, by and large, won't accept that. Low production values from big franchises are very rarely accepted and usually only specifically if they're catering to a type of nostalgia. Metal Gear for example is a franchise that blew up with high production values for the time (MGS is what put the franchise on the map) and intentional retro throwback graphics, outside of the occasional joke, is not going to get a positive reception because part of the appeal of franchise was the high quality graphics and cinematic cutscenes and so-on. There is very little room at the moment for 'mid-tier' games. It's a pretty well documented problem. It has been for a while but there was room to put it off with things like successful handhelds allowing for lower production value games to be created and supported, but mobile has eaten that pretty heavily. Some can succeed but they're usually established niches with built-in fanbases who they can rely on. Castlevania, just to use an example here, did try the lower-budget thing for a while (the GBA/DS games) and found increasingly diminishing returns saleswise despite positive critic and player responses. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Sep 23, 2017 |
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Sep 23, 2017 19:39
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ImpAtom posted:The problem is that gamers, by and large, won't accept that. Low production values from big franchises are very rarely accepted and usually only specifically if they're catering to a type of nostalgia. Metal Gear for example is a franchise that blew up with high production values for the time (MGS is what put the franchise on the map) and intentional retro throwback graphics, outside of the occasional joke, is not going to get a positive reception because part of the appeal of franchise was the high quality graphics and cinematic cutscenes and so-on. I'm a metal gear fan. It's the option was no game or a game that's just as fun but doesn't look as good, I take the later. Sadly, I know you're right. It's why Call of Duty sells so well every year.
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Sep 23, 2017 19:42
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Waffleman_ posted:Love to advocate genocide because a country likes a video game I don't. That's a thing a healthy person does. It's also where the people who made it live. 2 birds.
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Sep 23, 2017 19:46
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Zoro posted:From my understanding, Pachinko is basically their equivalent to our one-arm bandits, slot machines. But, this all just begs the question. If game development is so expensive that people are going into gambling instead, why not just make games that are cheaper? Couldn't you just lower the production values and save money? Not all games need to be 4K Ultra HD on my loving God games. They could be intentionally retro graphics. That's part of what's spurred the current state of the indie scene, as well as some developers using crowdfunding to make deliberate throwback games. Koji Igarashi's Bloodstained, for example, is a 2D dungeon explorer that's effectively a new skin on Symphony of the Night. You can also point at how some smaller genres have gotten a new lease on life this way, such as older-school RPGs (Wasteland II, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity II: Original Sin) or adventure games (Armikrog, Tim Schaefer's last few projects), because the fans paid some of the costs ahead of time. In the triple-A development space, however, this doesn't work. Part of it is because most of the big companies have gotten pigeonholed into only making the sort of games that big companies are best-suited to make: open worlds, massively multiplayer shooters, full online integration, new entries in huge franchises that are tentpoles for a given platform, etc. They have to go big or go home every time, or else they'd have to lay off half their work force. Another part of the problem is also that technically, these companies are competing with one another, and so it's a tech race, against one another and themselves, to one-up their rivals or outdo themselves. Most importantly, however, a lot of these games, despite the inflated budgets and difficulty of production, still make plenty of return and thus justify the whole thing. Remember, the problem for Capcom in particular isn't that it isn't making money; it's that it isn't making enough money to keep its shareholders happy. It's caught in a self-reinforcing problem, which in turn has caused several recent releases to fail or stall, because a project was released too early (Dead Rising 4 has a lot of the telltale signs of a rushed release) or without any real passion involved (Street Fighter V is a thoroughly corporate product without any real sense of investment on the behalf of its developers). Whatever else you can say about Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, at least Peter Rosas clearly got up every morning and wanted to help make a game that his tournament-regular buddies would enjoy, and it feels like that.
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Sep 23, 2017 20:04
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This whole situation sounds unsustainable. It sounds like a market that's on the brink of bursting. I have a feeling I'm not far off the mark.
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Sep 23, 2017 20:44
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Zoro posted:This whole situation sounds unsustainable. It sounds like a market that's on the brink of bursting. I have a feeling I'm not far off the mark. It's not "the market," not really. There's a somewhat radical difference between what games analysts tend to call "triple-A" and everyone else. This isn't a new problem, although the eighth generation has exacerbated it. Analysts have been bringing it up since pretty early in the PS3/360 era, when the rate of third-party releases slowed to a crawl on every major system, and the industry reacted accordingly. The independent studio scene is actually quite healthy right now, particularly given its influx of talent from triple-A, and you can do things on an indie budget now that would've been unthinkable as little as five years ago. Indie development is a shoestring lifestyle and it's inarguably flooded, but that has as much to do with the larger society (video game development as "side hustle"; the utter lack of enforced quality control in app stores) as it does with the games industry. Games development is still a relatively young business which is making a lot of painful missteps, especially since it's a tech industry and as such is infested on all levels with a particular flavor of technocratic idiot. However, it's also being propped up by some very big companies right now; it's become a big part of mainstream culture; and the cost of entry for both fans and developers has never been lower. The triple-A studio system is likely to face some serious challenges moving forward, not least of which is how it keeps trying to convince its primary userbase that what it really needs to do is drop another five grand on consumer electronics in order to play the next big hot thing, but the games industry in general is in really good shape.
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Sep 23, 2017 21:44
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While it is comforting to hear the issue is more for the big players and not the little guys, if the big guys fall, won't that have Ripple effects?
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Sep 23, 2017 23:19
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Zoro posted:While it is comforting to hear the issue is more for the big players and not the little guys, if the big guys fall, won't that have Ripple effects? That's not really a current concern. The "big guys" right now are companies like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, or Activision: multi-billion-dollar, international corporations that are propped up by massively popular franchises, profits from different departments in the same company, or both. Barring an act of God, we're stuck with most of the big players for the foreseeable future. Activision might be the most financially vulnerable right now, and even if it wasn't technically the same company as Blizzard, it could just fall back on its massive pile of Skylanders money. The issue isn't whether or not any of these companies are in imminent danger of shutting down, but rather, the "arms race" of increasingly harsh deadlines and high budgets, and the effect it has on the actual products. There's probably also something to be said about the enthusiast market, and how in the current economic environment, console games run a serious risk of pricing themselves out of their prime demographics' reach. However, since big-ticket titles like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty continue to sell millions of copies, it perpetuates the culture that makes them, and so it goes. (Japan also has its own games industry and development culture, which is facing a number of different problems than the West, not least of which is its rapidly aging population. They're running out of young people to help make the games, as well as the young people who'd ordinarily buy them.)
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Sep 24, 2017 00:54
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD84oMyeWXs
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Sep 24, 2017 00:56
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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-06-telltales-batman-uses-photo-of-assassinated-russian-ambassador Hoooo boy telltale hosed up big time here. How the hell does this even happen?
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Oct 6, 2017 10:32
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Synthbuttrange posted:http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-06-telltales-batman-uses-photo-of-assassinated-russian-ambassador I'm going to hazard a guess that an artist put it in there as a temporary asset and then forgot to take it out. Something similar happened with an Uncharted 4 trailer at one point, although the stolen asset wasn't as gruesome in that case.
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Oct 6, 2017 12:02
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That's what I would guess too, just because it's a real picture (or part of one) in a cartoon styled game.
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Oct 6, 2017 14:40
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I've been playing LEGO Marvel's The Avengers. It's not a great LEGO game. Since it almost exclusively uses movie dialog it doesn't have nearly as many jokes as normal (although there are still some great bits of slapstick), and it feels a bit disjointed because it's just the plots of the two Avengers films with vignettes, sidemissions and flashbacks to other MCU films. I definitely recommend the earlier Superheroes game instead. One nice touch is that without the F4 or X-Men characters (or Spiderman outside of some DLC) they've chosen to make some deep cuts for the character list, like Poundcakes, Blazing Skull and Butterball. It's been fun in the same way as the Marvel Handbook thread is fun.
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Oct 7, 2017 00:51
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Wanderer posted:They have been doing that sort of thing for as long as they've been a company. Resident Evil alone has several pachinko machines, several cell phone games, a theme restaurant, an amusement park ride, three animated movies that got theatrical releases, a clothing line, several different high-end toy lines, a licensed brand of airsoft pistols, and a trading card game. They've been diversified to hell and gone for decades and it's never slowed them down. I don't really think Wii U had much of anything to do with what Sony and MS have done this generation, somehow.
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Oct 7, 2017 14:48
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Not Sony, but Microsoft was not ready and pulled it out of their rear end.
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Oct 7, 2017 18:37
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Barry Convex posted:I don't really think Wii U had much of anything to do with what Sony and MS have done this generation, somehow. Not as far as a business plan or software lineup, no, but the Wii-U coming out when it did started the eighth console generation early. Past that, the Wii-U is a cautionary tale, if anything. That early start is why, for example, the first couple of years' worth of software for both the Xbone and PS4 is mostly "HD Remasters" and compilation discs.
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Oct 7, 2017 23:22
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Sony had been talking about the PS3 having a 10 year lifespan for years before the Wii U was a thing.
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Oct 8, 2017 00:21
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It does make me wonder how long is the lifespan of the current gen, or even if there is a "current gen" anymore, since they're doing incremental upgrades now. I figure there won't be anything closer to a PS5 or Xbox Duo for at least 3 or 4 years.
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Oct 8, 2017 00:27
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Between the PS4 Pro, Xbone X, and Nintendo Switch, we're definitely in some kinda 8.5th generation.
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Oct 8, 2017 01:29
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