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I guess that means it'll be at Evolution, which means SonicFox is likely to win its tournament.
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Jan 7, 2017 08:57
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ImpAtom posted:This is the first announcement that really fucks with the Injustice comic thing, isn't it? http://sightlessedog.tumblr.com/post/156741184574/i-cannot-wait-to-play-as-her Apparently it's specifically the Black Canary from the Regime universe, who Doctor Fate saved and stowed away in (yet a third) alternate universe.
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Feb 3, 2017 04:49
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I like that the alternate skin they show at the end of the Canary trailer is her Gary Frank Birds of Prey outfit. ...man, I hope her JLI outfit isn't in here.
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Feb 3, 2017 05:19
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Roth posted:Good God, that Cheetah design is the worst one yet. Yeah, I almost said something about that in the Games thread. She's technically wearing more than she does in her "classic" look, where she's just covered in fur, but they gave her a Shanna the She-Devil bikini and it somehow looks even more salacious. It's downright goofy. I'm hoping for a Poison Ivy skin that's just the Batman:TAS look, too.
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Feb 15, 2017 01:21
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Injustice in general depends very heavily on transporting your opponent to the Punch Dimension. It is a problem.
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Mar 3, 2017 19:47
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I'm going to be disappointed if the standard skin for Captain Cold doesn't come with a voice that's at least as much of an audible smirk as Wentworth Miller's. That dude delivers every line as Snart like he's explaining to a woman why he's tying her to train tracks.
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Mar 31, 2017 06:43
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Monaghan posted:It's kind of baffling how little info has been released about MVC infinite. I remember MVC 3 had characters trailers like once a month after the official announcement. Street Fighter V has been demanding a lot of Capcom's attention recently due to, to make a long story short, being a dumpster fire. It's probably safe to say at this point that MVC:I will come out strong at E3.
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Apr 7, 2017 21:36
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I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but since Luthor's super-pills are the explanation for everything in Injustice, that means that Harley's given them to her hyenas, and Selina's given one to that alley cat she can summon. This is a game where theoretically, you could KO Superman by siccing a house cat on him.Roth posted:The last announcement being The Joker is the single most flaccid and boring announcement that could happen other than Red Hood. It'd be sort of traditional for NRS. The last announcement for MKX was... Liu Kang.
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Apr 18, 2017 10:15
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If I remember correctly, at the time, Disney wanted to make Guardians and cosmic Marvel in general a big deal because they wanted to have a big space-opera franchise. Then they bought Lucasfilm outright and the plan got semi-abandoned.
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Apr 24, 2017 22:25
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I'm hoping my man Chris Redfield is more suited to my play style this time out, and that Spider-Man is better than he was in MVC3. Marvel and Capcom are the homes of my two big pop-culture obsessions, so the game's more or less made for me.
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Apr 26, 2017 00:03
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Capcom started strong, then lost a bunch of people in 2005 and started to backslide, which wasn't helped by the general malaise of the rest of the Japanese games industry. Capcom's still got some talent, and their games usually end up doing well, but their reputation's in the toilet. Netherrealm started weak, coasting off controversy, and kind of made two good games (MK2, arguably Shaolin Monks) over the course of 19 years before they finally figured something out with MK9. If you're being very generous, you can even spot them MKvDC, which has tremendous balance problems but a decent story mode, and is the first version of the new systems that were refined in MK9 and Injustice.
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May 19, 2017 05:19
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Lurdiak posted:Well yeah, Capcom used to be good, but that was well over a decade ago. Yeah, well over a decade ago is when they lost a lot of their go-to guys. They tried to outsource as much of their subsequent output as they could, with extremely mixed results (Ninja Theory's DMC reboot was a fan failure/financial success; DR2 was a smash, but DR3 and DR4 were much less popular and were hurt by platform exclusivity), and now they're trying to gather as much work back under one roof as they can. RE7 was almost totally in-house talent. SF5, to my mind, suffers way more from executive meddling than anything else. It's a vehicle to make them that e-sports money and there's very little love in that game. SF4 was outsourced to a different studio, and by the time it was a decent game, it was just about too late. MVC3/UMVC3, on the other hand, is good dopey fun. If anything, I'm concerned Infinite is watering things down too much. Aphrodite posted:Technically Netherrealm's first game was the 2011 Mortal Kombat. Netherrealm is Midway combined with a WB team, so it's hard to say how much influence that had on the final product. IIRC, most of the core Netherrealm crew are the same people who have been working on MK for quite a while now, particularly Boon and Beran. There's a pretty strong continuity there, although modern Netherrealm also includes a lot of local talent who grew up playing MK.
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May 19, 2017 07:29
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Dan Didio posted:I like that after the first game, where Regime Superman just kind of pouted and snarled at people, they remembered that Clark Kent is an actual smart guy with a quick wit, because he has some pretty brilliant lines in this game where he's being an rear end in a top hat to people and Newbern knocks it out of the park. It's interesting to think about the little differences they wrote into the universe to make the heel turn more believable. Most notably, the Injustice version of Lex Luthor was never a villain at all, and Brainiac has shown up so rarely that nobody knew who he was without asking Kara. A benevolent Luthor alone has to cut Superman's typical workload by what, half? Aphrodite posted:It's a choice. Those Japanese anime fighters are not accessible, and when you're making a Superman and Batman game you want to be accessible. I'd argue that there isn't much of a difference in accessibility, particularly in the modern Netherrealm format where every character has a trait button, EX moves, meter management, and a dozen command normals. It's just a question of what you're familiar with beforehand. "Anime fighters" do have the point of contention that most of them don't work as well on a pad, while Netherrealm games are built with the expectation that you'll be playing them on a default controller. With MVC in particular, as people have been telling me a lot lately, the major accessibility issue right now is the presence of the Capcom characters.
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May 19, 2017 19:48
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pubic works project posted:It was a great concept, just really poorly executed. It was like they rushed the game to cash in on that Ultimate Alliance money. IIRC, the Snowblind engine was very easy to use and a lot of studios rushed to use it to put out licensed/tie-in games, like The Bard's Tale, Champions of Norrath, and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. JLH's biggest problem is that it's one of the last games in that particular wave.
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May 29, 2017 01:55
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muscles like this! posted:A really weird thing about MvC is how they're using the design from the terrible Bionic Commando game that sold poorly and was a joke among fans for its ludicrous ending. The rumor is that Spencer is in Infinite because he was a popular tournament character, and specifically because Peter "ComboFiend" Rosas asked for him to be put back in. Rosas now works at Capcom.
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Jun 13, 2017 07:30
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Monaghan posted:Couple reasons off the top of my head. I was at E3 last week and I played both MVC:I and DBFZ. 1 & 2 I'll give you. 3: it's because the gem gives you a lot of options and the rapid-tag system lets you basically create your own assists. A lot of specials and supers aren't interrupted by tagging out, so for example, you can start up X's beam, tag out, and rush in while X is blasting. 4: nah, good team composition will still be a factor, since some characters will be a lot easier to set up assists/combos with than others. I'm not much of a theorycrafter, but I expect you'll want somebody with decent projectiles to cover for somebody without so much mobility, and your Gem selection is important enough that it'll also affect your team composition. 5: not really. A lot of them have new moves or play substantially differently due to changes in the overall mechanics; Iron Man's a lot faster (he seems to be the "Magneto" of this game, as far as rushdown goes), Captain America inherited Taskmaster's counter, Rocket lost most of his traps but gained Groot assists, etc. A lot of them may have similar-looking or -performing normals or special moves, but that was also the case from MVC2 to MVC3. I do think that it's playing its roster way too safe, especially when compared to MVC3 (no big weird dudes like MODOK, very few female characters, very few new characters at all), but it's a very different game overall and it feels like it. 6: the story demo is pretty awful, but it's not clunky. What you're seeing is the result of videos from people who are trying to figure the game out, since the button arrangements changed, and the overall game does feel a bit slower. It flows very well once you have a grasp on the basics. Right now, I think it's that there's enough visibly wrong or weird with MVC:I that it would be concerning from any company, let alone one with Capcom's current terrible reputation. The fanbase seems to have wanted a UMVC4 that was basically the same with a larger roster and an extensive balance patch (Morrigan shouldn't be able to do half the things she does; Vergil's entire gameplay, IIRC, is based around a glitch with Round Trip), but instead, they got all this. I expect a lot of it's down to the fact that MVC3 is notorious for being so frenetic that a layman has a hard time understanding what's going onscreen at all, let alone playing it, and they're chasing those casual dollars for all they're worth. Fans are already salty about SFV and this is an excuse to vent. MVC:I also feels a lot like it was made by pro FGC guys for pro FGC guys, as its high-level game is already pretty ridiculous. So far, I've already seen combos that contain multiple tags, baiting the burst swap so you can wipe out your opponent's whole team at once, customizing your assists, and some seriously degenerate play involving the Time Gem and projectiles. Guys like Ryu can outrun their own fireball by using the Time Gem dash and use it as a cross-up. The Reality Gem gives you a lot of weird lockdown potential since its ice trait freezes your target to the floor; Morrigan suddenly turns into UMVC3 Morrigan again if you activate the Time Gem storm, complete with 10 seconds of four to eight Soul Fists onscreen at once; and Zero can be confidently expected to be broken, because Zero is broken in every fighting game he's ever been in. It's going to be a nasty game at tournament level. Conversely, DBFZ is basically the result of UMVC3 and Guilty Gear having a crack baby. The graphics are pretty impressive, it has stuff like projectiles and teleports as standard parts of the character set, and a lot of it feels like somebody deliberately trying to jump into the gap that UMVC3 was leaving in the market. It's only about 20% done, though, and I'm genuinely curious how it'll play once the rest of the cast is in. There's a non-trivial chance that it might be too anime for its own good, though, as it's pretty easy to get to a point where there's so much god drat Kamehameha going on that you can't see what's happening onscreen. I'd hope that future characters have less blasting and more basic variance. (Vegeta basically has Amaterasu's Cold Star assist, which is weird. I would've expected his assist to be coming onscreen to scream at you about how you shouldn't need his help.)
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Jun 19, 2017 22:14
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Lobok posted:I don't know if I could ever pull it off because I've always been a fighting game scrub but there was one thing that totally sold me on DBZF and it was the fact that just before you unleash your Kamehameha as Goku you can Instant Transmission to get right up in your opponent's face (or back it seemed). Just like he did to Cell in the actual story. It's one of his supers. The teleport is baked into the move's progress; he teleports behind them right before he fires. ImpAtom hit me with it like three times in a row.
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Jun 19, 2017 23:43
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Lobok posted:Does he also have a non-teleporting version so that visually your opponent can't be sure which one it will be? IIRC, he's got the standard Kamehameha and the dirty mixup version.
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Jun 20, 2017 02:49
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Lightning Lord posted:I've never played a Monster Hunter, and I forgot that they still made Phoenix Wrights. Also, I forgot that Dragon's Dogma came out in 2012, since I mostly play games on the PC and it hit Steam in 2016. Also not much of a RE fan. One of the odd things about Capcom as a company is that while its reputation is in the toilet among games enthusiasts and long-time fans of its franchises, it hasn't had an out-and-out bomb on its recent record besides 2013's Remember Me. Many of its games didn't meet their wildly enthusiastic internal sales predictions (which seems to be a widespread problem with Japanese developers in particular; see also how Hitman sold perfectly well but still got branded as a failure by Square Enix, which is why IO Interactive is now an indie studio), but on the other hand, five of Capcom's top ten best-selling games of all time were released in the last five years. Its output has slowed to a trickle of what it was even seven or eight years ago, due to the prohibitive costs of developing on modern consoles, but all you can really say with any accuracy about its output is that it hasn't put out any games that were interesting to you. Critically and financially, Capcom's actually doing quite well, despite the fact that every decision it makes seems to piss off a brand-new segment of its audience.
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Jun 20, 2017 05:32
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Capcom's diversified as hell in Japan. Just Resident Evil has a live-action film franchise, a computer-animated film franchise, a theme restaurant, at least one theme park ride, a clothing line, and a bunch of branded toys. It's not really a question of diversification, though, so much as how the Japanese development industry's been changing lately. Nintendo managed to drop a grenade into the scene when they released the Wii-U, because they ended up starting the eighth console generation before anyone was at all ready for it, including third-party developers. At the same time, the Japanese development scene's been in a tailspin for years for a variety of factors, such as the ongoing Japanese demographic crisis, the rising costs of triple-A development, and losing ground to Western studios in foreign markets. Konami mismanaged a lot of its talent and franchises (it was really weird to find its booth at E3 this year, where the only thing it had on offer was a soccer game), but frankly, if you look at the state of the scene, switching over to mobile development and pachinko machines was probably a solid move. It's easily a tenth of the initial investment in exchange for steady, dependable gains. It's not actually out of the market, of course, and it wouldn't surprise me to see them make a comeback at some point. Capcom still has a lot of its talent and has become very good at leveraging the new digital marketplace, but to some extent, it's a victim of its own success. Most of its long-running franchises have fanatical followings, and it's impossible to keep everyone in those followings happy at once. Every decision it makes about any franchise is met with massive derision from somewhere, which serves as a big force multiplier when the company actually does poo poo the bed, as it has with Street Fighter V.
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Jun 20, 2017 06:10
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JordanKai posted:I think this was the last movie tie-in game Marvel made before realizing they weren't worth the effort. I think it has a lot more to do with how the console market changed. If you're going to do a cheap tie-in game these days, it's going to be on mobile.
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Aug 7, 2017 09:05
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JT Smiley posted:I was watching cutscenes from the game the other day and all I could wonder was, how the hell did that guy make the cut? But really, the majority of the Capcom side is super dated, have they seriously not created any new characters since the last game came out? And why can't we get regular Mega Man in games anymore? There's a pretty big problem in games right now where the production cost of a big mainstream game has skyrocketed. As a result, a lot of big publishers, including Capcom, are leaning hard on whatever popular franchises they might have, because brand-new intellectual properties tend to be either DOA or not as successful as they would have to be to justify the investment. Most of the company's output for the last six years has been re-releases and sequels. They also went out of their way to put the most "iconic" looks for each character into MVC:I, which is why the game features RE5 Chris and DMC3 Dante. Mega Man has a problem that, as far as anyone from outside the company can tell, has to do with internal politics. His creator left Capcom under acrimonious circumstances.
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Sep 22, 2017 19:10
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Samuringa posted: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. It's probably too far out to make a reasonable guess. One of the issues with trying to play futurist with the video game industry is that Sony and Microsoft are both big and stubborn enough to bulldog the market into some semblance of what they want it to be, while Nintendo will just do whatever the hell it wants. It's not a question of predictable evolution, but rather, what these specific players are thinking at any given point in time. By rights, I would've expected every video game platform to basically be Steam at this point, but no one's ready to sink the physical media market just yet.
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Oct 8, 2017 08:36
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Skwirl posted:There's still enough chunks of North America with lovely enough connections that you'd lose a small but still part of the market if you ditch physical entirely. Plus doesn't Canadian internet still have lovely monthly caps on data? The demo for the new Gran Turismo game is 43 gigs. Yeah, it's a question of when the money you lose by ditching physical media is more than you gain by not having to spend the manufacturing cost anymore, plus the destruction of the second-hand market. There are a lot of recent practices that have been influenced, wholly or in part, by GameStop's used game policies.
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Oct 8, 2017 18:48
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I haven't read a Spawn comic for a long time, but when I did, I remember stuff happening to him that would not be wildly out of place in a Mortal Kombat game, like when he ended a big crossover with Batman with a Batarang jutting out of his face.
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Oct 9, 2017 18:58
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The Question IRL posted:But that thought has always stuck with me. Like why not make a computer game, with a generic engine that is easy to work with and does all the stuff that you want the main game to do. What you're proposing is basically the same as trying to shove two entirely different types of engine into a single automobile. The engine for a program is the central set of software libraries which guides every bit of the whole experience, from graphics to physics to where its files are located. Using another engine entirely for a specific segment would comically bloat the size of the final product for an uncertain benefit to the end-user, at least double the time it took to test and debug the game, and require a producer to hire a team of employees specifically to work with and integrate the two programs, which is going to blow a big hole in the game's operating budget. It's much simpler to use a single, flexible engine that can do most or all of what you ask of it, and if somebody wants to make a game that demands more performance or utility than existing engines can produce, then they're just going to make a new engine.
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Oct 31, 2017 18:11
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The go-to number in games development, due to the current prevalence of achievement systems, is 30%. When you release a game, it must be with the knowledge that an average of 70% of your end users will not play it for long enough to complete it, in whatever form that completion takes. It's actually a little disquieting if you look at similar statistics. A lot of players also mash buttons to get into a game as quickly as possible, so a lot of games get played with the first default customization profile, or whichever main character is the first one you can select. 80% of Mass Effect players use the default white male Shepard.
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Oct 31, 2017 18:40
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Skwirl posted:I know a good chunk will just go with the default no matter what, but I wonder how much that 80% would change by if the default Shepard wasn't a white male. There was a multiplayer survival game that in alpha you could only be a bald white dude, but an update made it so you could also be a bald black dude, but you couldn't actually choose, you were just randomly assigned one or the other and stuck with that forever. A lot of people complained about being forced to be a black guy. Probably a fair bit. Single-player video games on a console or PC have a significant enough barrier to entry that the primary demographic for them is still young white guys, and most people, if given the choice, tend to play characters in games that reflect themselves. It's one of the reasons why so many video game protagonists tend to be young, generically handsome white guys, and why a lot of multiplayer shooters will have an entry-level, back-to-basics character who's a white guy, i.e. Soldier in Overwatch or Hollywood in Agents of Mayhem. It's one of those sociological game factors that tends to change a lot when you get into the enthusiast population, of course. Enthusiasts are the ones who don't mind playing flamboyantly ugly fantasy races in their RPGs, or who'll spend two hours tweaking every detail of a custom Shepard, and in a mainstream game, the 10 to 20% of the user base who are enthusiasts can still comfortably be a few hundred thousand people. Since they also congregate together due to a shared interest, it can result in a media bubble where they have no idea how the silent majority is actually playing the same games.
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Oct 31, 2017 22:18
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Comfortador posted:THIS. I don't understand why they didn't take every superhero property and make something like this or GTA. Spider-man 2 (Which we all know and love) was like that as well. That's what I hope the new Spider-man is. Open-world games were incredibly time- and money-intensive to make even back in the PS2 era. Even a relatively featureless city that you made up yourself (i.e. Liberty City) is going to take thousands of man-hours to render, populate, and test. It's part of why a lot of the earlier open-world games are also notoriously, hilariously buggy; for every bug you encounter in-game, assume there were half a dozen that just happened to be ahead of it on the priority list. Eventually they just had to ship the drat thing. Starting in the HD era, it became prohibitively costly to develop open-world games at all for anyone besides triple-A developers, since the raising level of technology meant the development process itself became incrementally more expensive. A lot of the third-party studios that made their bones off that kind of thing went under or got acquired. It also didn't help that every time Rockstar put out a new game, it effectively raised the bar on what "open world" actually meant. Right now, open-world games require so many man-hours to produce that they've become the exclusive province of a relative handful of developers, who can keep at it because they enjoy major studio backing (Sucker Punch), a complicated multi-studio structure that turns every release into a 12-office jam session (Ubisoft), or a track record of immense success (Rockstar). Anybody else isn't going to want to commit to that expensive of a production, especially with a studio like Insomniac that kinda took a bath on its last couple of major releases. Now, you can turn around and say, "Well, gently caress that, then. A studio could just pretend it's 2002 and give me an open-world game with PS2-quality graphics, right? That'd be easier and cheaper!" Well, yes, in theory. It'd also be a very hard sell at a shareholder's meeting and it'd go over in the casual market like a case of the clap. It's also a level of time and money commitment that's well beyond the reach of the current hobbyist/indie developer, though that probably won't be the case for much longer. I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see some kind of early sixth-generation retro craze at some point in the near future, where people get way into super-blocky polygons and simple 3D animations for a while, but you still wouldn't see anybody but the doomed or the crazy try to release an open-world game. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Nov 1, 2017 |
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Nov 1, 2017 01:34
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The Question IRL posted:I guess that sort of makes sense. I suppose I was thinking in terms of the days when Game Companies would devote time to making long pre-rendered cutscenes for the Intro that was done with graphics far in advance of the main game. (The PS1/PS 2 Era Final Fantasy Games. A lot of PC adventure games like Outcast etc..) Basically bring something like that back for one or two specific sequences not in the games main engine and just make it a branching cutscene, which is disguised with some button prompts to decide the players choice, or a basic "Rock/Paper/Scissors" style mechanic where your choice is either the right response, the sort of right response, the sort of wrong response or sort of wrong. You really aren't making a lot of sense here. You want the visual clarity of a PS/PS2-era prerendered movie combined with some degree of interactivity? Because we've more or less had that for close to a decade now. Those prerendered sequences in earlier games were just movie files set to play when the player performed certain actions.
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Nov 1, 2017 18:00
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El Gallinero Gros posted:Has there been much in the way of news about the SquareEnix Marvel game? The last time I checked, it was in that nebulous stage where all we know is that it exists. We can probably expect to hear a lot more about it next year once the Infinity War marketing starts to spin up. muscles like this! posted:They haven't announced when but Marvel Heroes is shutting down. Let the mad scramble for private servers begin.
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Nov 15, 2017 21:48
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