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[JoshuaFH]

From what my weary mind can gather at the moment, is that while I do appreciate innovation, there's a truly warped and deranged emotion echoing in my mind. The emotion I speak of is that there's all sorts of tingly and nostalgic feelings I have tied with the FF series, and over the years I have developed a sort of expectation of it.

Think of it like this: while the FF series is really just a set of games, I FEEL as though they are not games, but a brand name. This is warped and deranged because, objectively, I should really only be concerned about their merits individually, but I don't, I look at them as a whole. So when XII comes around and sucks, I bash it pretty hard because my expectation for the BRAND of FF is already set so high. If FFXII weren't named FFXII, but something else like "Vaan's Awesome Adventure" then I probably would have been more receptive to commending it's innovation, and less hard on it's mistakes overall.

Now that I think about it, the way that we might see games as brands and not as individual experiences is kind've scary, since it places developers in the awkward position of having to constantly one-up themselves in order to please the ever growing expectations of the fanbase which are clamoring for new and better enjoyment which is also familiar and doesn't alienate their sensibilities. In this way, I suppose, if the sequal-istic mindset really is continuously fed, then it might burn out the companies responsible that can't keep up with expectation, and being unable to actually come up with new ideas, the market would crash again. Tis' all speculation though.

EDIT: Also, is there a way I can get a hold of this book you were talking about?

[Chutney]

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Game-Design-Ernest-Adams/dp/0321643372/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258781070&sr=1-1
appears to be a newer version of mine, i cant find my version at all. I could also sell you mine when I'm done with it (end of the semester) 

[Sevrun]

Well stand by gents, because some of the guys who tried changing things up and doing something a little unorthodox have gone under.  Pandemic was shut down with barely a heads up as of the beginning of this week and I doubt they'll be the last.  IGN had a pretty good article on the last 48 hours of the studio and right up until the bitter end the guys in charge of the place were trying to insist they weren't in any real danger of having any lay offs.  Talk about a little oopsie, eh?

I mention this because I was very fond of Pandemic's work in general, and it leaves me with this dull gnawing ache in my gut that the 'cookie-cutter' mentality you guys were talking about is about to get worse.  Maybe I'm wrong, and I really hope I am... but I can't remember the last time I was wrong with something bad.

[Chutney]

Pandemic's last 2-3 games really bombed though, and they were all sequels/spinoffs that didn't really try anything different?
Lord of the Rings: Conquest was just a star wars battlefront game in middle earth AND wasn't too fun(at least, the demo wasn't), from what I saw
Mercenaries 2 was terribly buggy and glitchy and nobody liked it from what I've seen
Destroy All Humans never really got talked about much. I didn't even know they released a second one.

and that saboteur game just kinda seems like yet another "kill dem nazis" game :/
No real big loss here, I think.

[Muz]

I've been in and out of the video game industry so many times. I hate it. There are so many things wrong with it. It's a horrible industry.. it has the highest technical requirements of all the entertainment businesses, but some of the most inept people out there. There are powerful weapons for keeping IP - copyrights, trademarks and patents, but the game industry is either not using them properly, or abusing the hell out of the system. They aim for the short-term instead of long-term, as soon as they get something profitable, like gore or guitar hero games, they milk the hell out of it. Games journalism is horrible, with very little credibility.

Being entertainment, it has the potential to reap huge profits, like the movie industry. Spend a few million on a high budget game, get more millions in return. The potential market is huge - everyone loves interactive entertainment. Horror games can be way better than horror movies. Date games can work better than date movies. Action also works better when you're a part of it, rather than sitting back and watching.

But everyone is content with milking the cash cow until it bleeds. Game industry companies have a notoriously short lifespan. Atari died from idiocy. Midway died recently, after people just stopped buying it. Plenty of other publishers and developers go down throughout the years and most of them just deserve it.

Indie game developers are equally bad. Everyone believes that their platformer is the next Cave Story; their puzzle game the next World of Goo. Very few take a realistic outlook, you have dozens of gamers whining that piracy hurts too much, and insisting on high prices. Hey, if people aren't buying your game at the price you're asking, either it's too expensive or it's not good enough.

Nobody is taking a proper solution. Everyone is taking the easiest, shortest way out. Games can be a wonderful medium. It's hard work, so I understand why people would want to take an easy way out. But all of the entertainment industry is very hard work. When a singer or an actor retires with their millions of dollars.. they deserve it because of their hard work. Game industry people are lazy. They want to work from home, they want flexible hours, they want to get maximum profit with minimum creative effort.


Some exaggerations and generalizations, but it's how it is overall. I'm probably doomed to return to the games industry again, but hell, I hate it. You can spend years making a game that's possibly bad, possibly superb.. or you could spend years making a game that uses a proven formula. Guess what companies and indie game developers are going to pick?

[Psyco Jelly]

Something that interests me is how big-budget games can sometimes 'feel' indie. I can't really describe it, I guess you could say that the game embraces what it is. I'm talking about games like Okami and Little Big Planet.

Okami didn't do so well on the market, but it's getting a sequel for the DS.

It seems that the large corporations are making it easier for indie games to enter the market, with WiiWare and the like. I'm glad to see indie developers can make money while still experimenting with the genre.

[JoshuaFH]

So Chutney, are you studying to become a game designer or something, since you have a textbook for it?

[Chutney]

My Major is labeled "Gaming, Simulation, and Robotics" but really it's a computer science degree with the added benefits of 3-4 classes on game design. I was hoping for slightly more robotics (you may have noticed from my posts lol) but it turns out we only have one class senior year that even remotely relates to dealing directly with robots. Currently I'm taking the first Game Design course, next semester I've got another one that deals with specifically 3D game design, and I forget the other two.
I'm also going to intern for EA at some point (basically every "GSR" kid here interns for EA at some point because our school has cut a deal with them).

Game industry people are lazy. They want to work from home, they want flexible hours, they want to get maximum profit with minimum creative effort.

which is what EA gives their employees, according to some people who interned there. haha

You can spend years making a game that's possibly bad, possibly superb.. or you could spend years making a game that uses a proven formula. Guess what companies and indie game developers are going to pick?

serious ones will luckily choose the risky one. Sure, in the RPG maker or Game maker community there's not going to be much fun or innovation but people like cactus or MrPodunkian can make fantastically risky games. Their most recent release, Dungeon, was absolutely beautiful. These indie developers believe in gameplay over anything else and they're damn right about it.
Edmund, I forget who it was by but it was made for a semi-recent game making contest took a huge risk by making a game about raping a woman and/or murdering innocent villagers in Viet Nam. It won.

Okami didn't do so well on the market, but it's getting a sequel for the DS.

this makes me happy

also I'd like to say Muz has it pretty much correct