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Author Topic: Arcen games in financial trouble  (Read 6976 times)

Sowelu

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #45 on: October 05, 2010, 09:36:13 pm »

Again:  Things like Cave Story and Plants & Zombies and Spelunky and stuff ARE mainstream games.  They're not these big arthouse things.  (If you don't think Plants & Zombies is mainstream, go look at the software section of your local Target.)  Indie studios CAN take risks and do things that big companies are afraid to do, and they can fail miserably at them, at exactly the same rate as when big companies do them.

Mainstream games, regardless of big or indie publisher, are generally successful if they aren't bad games.
Non-mainstream games, regardless of big or indie publisher, are extremely hit-and-miss.  (Katamari Damacy is a positive example!)  Big studios don't take them on because if they fall, they fall hard.  But little garage companies do it and when they fail, nobody even notices.  Just another failed would-be game studio, or just a few months that were 'fun'.  Yeah, when you're an indie studio, you can say "at least we had fun making it" because your stockholders aren't going to fire you over it.
« Last Edit: October 05, 2010, 09:37:48 pm by Sowelu »
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a1s

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #46 on: October 05, 2010, 10:05:12 pm »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Do you really think there would be a market for a game that actually used a learning enemy? Bearing in mind how computers are inherently good at the kinds of games where "AI" (the fake kind) is usually used? Computers were invented with 2 purposes in mind:
a) calculating firing solutions (making them potentially deadly at FPSs/vehicle sims, especially ones where BVR weapons are used)
b) projecting resource use, for civilian or military purposes (making them deadly at strategy games, especially economic ones)
and if you give them the chance they will eat you alive.

Quote
On the Aurora forums someone asked Steve if he could implement scrollbars in Aurora to clean up the UI and make it possible to play on low resolutions, and the answer was "Steve programs this game for himself to help facilitate his story writing and we're all lucky to even be able to play it as it is"
In all truth, all it takes to add (shitty) scrollbars to a window, is changing a single property of the form- standard windows elements will do the rest for you. His refusal to do this is, frankly, baffling. Though perhaps he wants to do scrollbars well or not at all, let's hope that is the case.

And,
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Black Isle isn't anything anymore.
Black Isle is Obsidian Entertainment, do your research.
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Sowelu

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #47 on: October 06, 2010, 01:13:10 am »

It's a lot easier to write an expert system than it is to write a learning computer--or rather, the expert system will be better than the learning one.

It WOULD be nice to play against an enemy that learns your tactics in an RTS, from mission to mission.  But I don't know if it would...work.  I mean.  What games would a learning machine be appropriate in?  I guess it would be nice if an FPS opponent started learning where you camped, right?  Now that I come to think about it though, I'm pretty sure some of the Quake 1 bots at least learned where THEY should camp or not-camp.

And an almost-trivial way to design an expert system for your bots is to run them against each other a hojillion times until they learn what's a good and a bad place to be, then you save that data out.  Heck I know that at least one old TBS used that strategy to determine some basic colony-placement tactics.  But all these are...well, not QUITE "learning" systems.  I mean they kind of are, but they don't learn in real-time, which I guess is what you're after, right?

Here's one problem with learning systems.  They're easy to fake out.  You need to metametagame and bring some serious iterated Prisoner's Dilemma shit.  Or, look at Warning Forever, where theoretically the enemy ship evolves to use whatever weapons killed you the best, so the optimal strategy is to sacrifice a few ships to convince it you have a weak point that doesn't really exist.  Valid play-style but not what's intended by the designers most of the time.  You lull your enemy into playing one way, then you beat them down in another way.  Yes, that's also pretty cool against a human opponent, where you convince your buddy that all you ever do is build a shit-ton of horses, then suddenly one game you slaughter his pikemen with nothing but massed archers or whatever.  But when you develop so close of a personal relationship with your computerized opponent that you're trying to fool it over multiple games...  Well, isn't that a little bit sad?
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Some things were made for one thing, for me / that one thing is the sea~
His servers are going to be powered by goat blood and moonlight.
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Ioric Kittencuddler

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #48 on: October 06, 2010, 02:10:13 am »

Black Isle is Obsidian Entertainment, do your research.

It may have lots of the same people but for anyone who's played their games it's obvious they aren't the same studio.  All they do is try to ride the coat tales of Bioware's success. 

If you really want to make that argument though you also have to say that Black Isle is Blizzard Entertainment,  Carbide Studios,  inXile Entertainment, and all the other devs who left Black Isle to form Troika and were then scattered when it shut down.
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Tilla

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #49 on: October 06, 2010, 03:36:29 am »

I think I'm most looking forward to the stuff being done by DoubleBear, who are also ex-blackisle :P Dead Nation sounds better every time a dev log comes up
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Keiseth

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #50 on: October 06, 2010, 06:53:14 am »

Okay, several of the posts in this topic have irritated me for various reasons. I'm going to pretend they don't exist now.

I'm pretty sad to hear this-- AI War was a pretty revolutionary game, at a very affordable price, with constant content updates. It seems like the developer is trudging right through financial worry and working on 4.0, which is a commendable devotion to the art of making a game.

I thought AI War was a rather pretty game already. I mean it's not a graphical power house but it has a nice, crisp UI, everything is very visible and blends together well. It's remarkably easy to pick up, too. So the upgrade is interesting to me.
Agree, some people haven't even tried the damn game. I don't see how it doesn't look impressive, did you watch the trailer? And yea, it's not AI war that's the problem anyway.
Also, what's wrong with the interface?

I think I worded that wrong because (like now) I'm way late to sleep.

I meant to say it's *already* crisp and clean, and rather pretty. So an update to make it more pretty and more crisp is interesting because I thought it already was!

*Edit, the sleep wars roll on*

Again, I agree with Sowelu 100%. Splunkey is nothing new, yet is super popular and coming to X-Box. Plants vs. Zombies brings nothing special to the table, same with almost every pop-cap game. Castle Crushers is the same way. None of these games "Break the mold", but they are presented in a pleasant way and are simply fun. None of these games are OMFG epic either.

And to say AI isn't about "OMFG SO MENY UNETS!" flys in the face of every ounce of marketing the game has to offer. The trailer on their site lists it first, the features section of their site lists it first, and everywhere you look it is the feature they bill.

Regardless of the merits of AI my message to any indy studio is to limit your scope and focus on making something fun.

Also “lol” at people who think Auroa and DF have good interfaces. Why the fuck can’t I build a smelter? Oh, apparently it isn’t a work shop. Which stockpile do barrels end up in again? Why do I have to click 6 times PER Z-LEVEL to designate a 3x3 shaft? Even if you love the game, you cannot make an argument that the interface is “good”.

I think the massive number of units is definitely an advertising point, but it's certainly not what the game is about, despite it being the first thing advertised. I'd say it's a trick of advertising. You capture attention with an interesting element (huge numbers) and attract a buyer from an interested passerby by slowly exposing the core of the product.

I'd say it's about an RTS designed to be almost free of micromanagement blended into a (potential) tower defense game. And this is all on how the player plays. You could use Knowledge to unlock so much in turrets and support items that it'd be a tower defense game. You can ignore them entirely and unlock additions to your fleet. You can mix both safely.

AI War isn't OH MY GOD TEN THOUSAND UNITS. AI War isn't THERE'S SO MUCH GOING ON WHOA.

It's an RTS with tower defense elements that's up to eight player cooperative against intelligent and tricky AI.

That's pretty niche, definitely, but games that have been far more niche than that have sold amazingly. The scope of the game should include a pretty tremendous number of people. Do you like RTS games? Do you at least tolerate tower defense elements? Do you like playing with your buddies against AI? Here you go.

That's really all there is to it. It's far more focused on a specific audience than Minecraft, Cave Story, et. al. but not nearly as focused as Dwarf Fortress. Master of Orion is a hugely known game. I (think?) it sold pretty well. So I don't think narrow scope and focus is Arcen's problem.

If anything I'd say Arcen's problem is the lack of focusing, in fact! Tidalis is a puzzle game, and it looks fun and like a quality puzzle game... but I don't want to play a puzzle game right now. I didn't buy it. I only see so many people who enjoy AI War being the sort of people who enjoy Tidalis.

So I'm sad to see them go. In terms of interface and design, I loved everything about the game. The controls were perfect, the ability to zoom out massively far or in painfully close was great. Simple resource management, unit AI that's good enough to figure out irritating little things by itself and so on. (Seems like ships that boost other ships will automatically choose a pretty intelligent location to place themselves in your fleet, and I don't see them bunching up together and limiting effectiveness.)

(Little pointless tidbit: Riot Control Starships. Super-ships that had customizable attachments and turrets to make each one individual. I loved them so much that I ended up making the maximum amount possible of each rank. They were so much fun to use; ones with lightning turrets, shotguns, little long range lasers with fairly high damage, machineguns, and a big mobile shield, all operating independantly with their own health and such. Good times.)
« Last Edit: October 06, 2010, 07:15:06 am by Keiseth »
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Cheese

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #51 on: October 06, 2010, 10:20:22 am »

<3 you Keiseth. Cba to rant a page at the moment.
It seriously isn't all about the units, to quote the brief feature list;
Quote
At A Glance
- Space-based RTS, single player or up to 8 player co-op.
- Powerful emergent AI that retreats, probes defenses, and surprises even veterans with intelligent tactics.
- 30,000+ ships at a time on 10-120 simultaneous planetary battlefields.
- Different Every Time: 16 billion procedural maps, each with specific units. - A focus on deep strategy with nearly no micromanagement.
It's just one of the features, and certainly isn't the first mentioned. And the amount of units does make for some epic battles, pretty fun to watch, and the few that post AARs have made some decent stories out of them. I find the game does tend to be more about strategy than tactics so the large mothball fleets are generally for randomly throwing at whatever you want to capture, though there are some tactics to it. You're going off the fact that it happens to be the first feature mentioned in the video.
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Fikes

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #52 on: October 06, 2010, 11:38:09 am »

Keiseth's write up is far more constructive and informative than anything I have seen in the past. The game actually sounds interesting now.

Also, when I said first, I was referring to their chaos filled trailer.

While I may have been wrong about AI, I still maintain that Indy companies can be more successful with "mainstream" simple games. They don't need to go way over the top or "bend genres".

Cheese

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Re: Arcen games in financial trouble
« Reply #53 on: October 06, 2010, 12:11:43 pm »

Keiseth's write up is far more constructive and informative than anything I have seen in the past. The game actually sounds interesting now.

Also, when I said first, I was referring to their chaos filled trailer.

While I may have been wrong about AI, I still maintain that Indy companies can be more successful with "mainstream" simple games. They don't need to go way over the top or "bend genres".
Unless the developers made the game because they personally thought something was wrong with a genre they likes, but I suppose that's generally amazing free stuffs.
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