61–70 of 98 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's like saying that somebody should be pretty good at physics because Einstein was. Juggling lots of ideas at once was pretty much Leonardo da Vinci's thing.
Discouraging people from having confidence in themselves (even when that confidence is unrealistic) is one of the biggest tragedies brought about by modern-day mediums such as HN et al. I'd rather strike out a dozen times than watch from the stands.
This article is so full of incendiary bullshit, I'm surprised it even got on the front page. Some of the most critically acclaimed games, as well as highest selling games, have stories. For example: Grand Theft Auto 3. Final Fantasy VII. Ico. Metal Gear Solid. Arkham Asylum. Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Dark Souls. Demon Souls. Starcraft. Starcraft II. Modern Warfare. World of Warcraft. Do you know what else made these g…
I played Deus Ex when I was in high school and was more impressed by its storyline than anything I read in English lit.
As an amateur game designer, this sentence hits home like none other. This is the embodiment of the fine line between a short-lived game and one that will stay in history books. Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D had it for me. Starcraft, Super Mario Bros or Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo had it for others. When you enjoy every single second and wish you could do it again the minute after, then you know you have a true immortal game in front of you.
One of my prominent design patterns when I try to work on games is to focus on very elementary satisfaction and a promess that doing it once more will still make the player smile. On FPS games for example, a cool and straightforward way to achieve that is to design levels so that they would work in all of single player, cooperative and deathmatch modes. Unfortunately, such good practices were lost in translation when we entered the third millenium and the era of in-game cinematics.
Excuse me but how is this person the authority on what games are and are not. "Many games designers think its their job to tell stories, but games isn't a story medium, they should go write books or make films." Have you heard of Sierra? King's Quest? Or maybe Legend of Kyrandia? Or in the FPS genre, Half Life? Or the Deus Ex trilogy? These are all games in which the story has stayed with me much longer than the game…
I agree. Doom3 didn't start with a gun in your hand. It's DOOM, for hell's sake, you gotta have a piece in your hand, right from the git-go.
The article goes to a very wrong direction when he starts blaming artists for the decline of FPS games.
This article is so full of incendiary bullshit, I'm surprised it even got on the front page. Some of the most critically acclaimed games, as well as highest selling games, have stories. For example: Grand Theft Auto 3. Final Fantasy VII. Ico. Metal Gear Solid. Arkham Asylum. Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Dark Souls. Demon Souls. Starcraft. Starcraft II. Modern Warfare. World of Warcraft. Do you know what else made these g…
Yes, these games made it big and were good, but did they really push boundaries and invent new styles of play? No, they are just a story with an engine - the OP is talking about JC going off and doing something "different."
Grand Theft Auto 3? The grand-daddy of open-world gameplay? It even gave birth to an entire genre of clones.
World of Warcraft? Didn't invent a new style of play? They took Evercrack and distilled it into pure, fine weapons-grade MMORPGing!
Metal Gear Solid? Didn't have an incredibly unique (and much cloned, and much parodied) style of play? Whose story and art direction is so famous that today we have people running around conventions with big exclamation marks over their heads?
Ditto Mass Effect - whose conversational mechanics practically redefined how all games do it today?
Arkham Asylum? Whose unprecedented combination of unique art style, stealth mechanics, pitch-perfect voice acting, investigative gameplay, and open-world format was widely lauded by both players and critics?
Oh yeah, those games. I'm sure the stories were not at all core to the games' success. It's all the mechanics, I'm sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the most critically acclaimed games, as well as highest selling games, have stories. He's not saying games don't have stories, of course they do, he's saying that some game designers get distracted from making good mechanics, which I agree, is a huge mistake. Mechanics is the core of the medium, and shouldn't be put second on the list. Valve gets that. Their attention and talent put into storytelling and art…
Mechanics are not the core of the medium. It can be for some games but the medium is much wider than that. How do you explain games that have basically no mechanics at all? I'm talking about simple point and click games like Myst. There are no significant mechanics there, but there can be a great story, and great visuals to keep you interested.
what exactly are you talking about? myst has significant game mechanics. all games have game mechanics.
Obviously I don't know any internals of what happened post-acquisition but it's likely that John has a lot less control over the game shipping. More specifically, with a huge company behind him the likelihood is the artists etc will continue to have influence in a way that will perpetuate the OP's frustration.
id Software made id Tech 5. Bethesda was tasked with making a game on top of it that would be a well rounded showcase of the engines capabilities and a good game.
Before Bethesda was Raven, Nerve, Gray Matter Interactive, etc. I believe Quake III Arena was the last "pure id" game.
The author seems to miss the fact that id Software didn't make Rage. id Software made id Tech 5. Bethesda was tasked with making a game on top of it that would be a well rounded showcase of the engines capabilities and a good game. Before Bethesda was Raven, Nerve, Gray Matter Interactive, etc. I believe Quake III Arena was the last "pure id" game.