General Gaming Discussion Thread

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We have a thread for discussing the games we are currently playing, but nothing to discuss general gaming news, rumors, reviews, etc, so here we go. I found this article over at IGN of all places. It is related to Disgaea but one part in particular stuck out. It was a bit of a surprise hearing it from a mainstream journalist. In an industry that is trying to broaden their customer base at all costs it is nice to hear of a developer who caters strictly to their audience rather than stripping the "niche" game mechanics to appeal to more people.


"Taking care of the fans who’ve gotten you here is often better than trying to bring in imaginary new ones.

Conventional wisdom, across most consumer industries (video games included) is that growing your customer base is tantamount to success. Part of that is coming up with huge new story/gameplay twists to anchor your sale’s pitch around. “It’s the (insert annual franchise) you love, but now with co-op multiplayer/in the future/with zombies!!!” Just as often, this means cutting things developers think create a barrier to entry for new players. Bioware infamously stripped Dragon Age of most of its substantial RPG depth for the second entry in the series, shifting the focus to hack-and-slash style combat for the stat-phobic masses. There’s no real way to measure, in terms of units sold, whether or not this helped or hurt the franchise financially, but that’s not really the point.


The point is that people like me, who loved Dragon Age: Origins for being the modern-day Baldur’s Gate we’d been craving, were left with little to enjoy in Dragon Age 2, and no, the fact that it helped the franchise sell more copies overall didn’t make me feel any better about that. The message being sent was clear to me: tapping into a potential market of people who typically ignore this genre was more important than keeping the people who support it happy."


It is refreshing to hear this coming from a review site that typically gives a pass to games that simplify mechanics, like Fallout 4 for instance.

Here is the full article for your viewing pleasure.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/07...aign=Blogroll&abthid=5599b916ed027c0b75000007
 
It seems like the Nintendo NX will actually have Thirdparty support, maybe Nintendo finally learnt something. I jsut hope the rumors about it being an Android based device aren't true.
 
I've heard the same. The Android based rumors are troubling, but surely Nintendo wouldn't be that stupid. Right? :grin:
 
I've rarely bothered to wait for a game, active anticipation is just bothersome
but now that I got a PS4, and still no real games that I care much about (I bought GTA of course) - I am actually waiting, in anticipation, for Gran Turismo 7

The previous one I played was Gran Turismo, on Playstation. Needless to say - long ago :D It had like... a hundred cars or so? Hundred and fifty? I was just taken back at the magnitude, multitude and detail
Now there's gonna be some 2000 or more cars
I'm not even a big car-dude, I don't drive, don't plan to, dunno much about them, but what little interest I got, that game really spurs it!
It's been long since I've claimed to not be able to wait for a game, but I'm almost there now :D

I'm such an old fart with games, I like having like... 3-4 super-favorite games, that I play over and over
 
IGN said:
But unlike so many other hardcore JRPGs - and games in general - Disgaea is a franchise that refuses to change with the times.
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I found this quote amusing. The big JRPGs took their sweet time to change beyond what was established in the early 90's and failed to learn lessons from the installments that innovated in the mid 90's. Lots of other companies experimented and there are some that were successful in changing but Final Fantasy has somehow remained the big series. At this point, the classic mechanics are used in numerous flash and mobile games, in part due to how simple they are, and yet FFXIII didn't make great strides beyond them. It shows that there is a balance to be struck between innovation and remaining true to you're core audience. Disgaea is devoted to their core audience and uses established franchises to tweak and make money. I need to get around to playing Disgaea 2 one of these days to see how much they change between iterations... I'm curious if the development costs are lower on their sequels or not due to having an established framework to work within.

TorontRayne said:
It is refreshing to hear this coming from a review site that typically gives a pass to games that simplify mechanics, like Fallout 4 for instance.
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We'll see what Fallout 4 does. I know how popular the dialog wheel is here but did Fallout 3 ever offer more than four dialog choices? I know New Vegas did but that's a different beast. Once we find out what they've done with skills, we'll have more to talk about. Given how crappy Fallout 3's skill system was, particularly for combat skills, change could be a very good thing. Then again, this is from the makers of The Elder Scrolls, which also has a crap skill system, so my hopes are low. More on topic, it is refreshing that it's being mentioned.

I think IGN may be more shrewd than most of us give them credit for, they may simply write the articles for the target audience of the game or topic being covered, especially in fluff pieces like this. If I had the time I'd dig around to find out...
 
FO4 looks to be a focus on new and nifty thingies. Revamped crafting. Settlement building. More customizable outfits.

That's all well and good, but just like with FO3, Bethesda SEEMS to be missing that what was so central and essential to the impressive Fallout experience was the WORLD- as experienced through the game's story, and interacting with its characters; not how high you can jump on random cliffs. And just as with Skyrim, it looks like Bethesda is cannibalizing on the good ideas from FONV and elaborating upon them in their next game (just as with TESV, this time with FO4). So, with any luck, all those nifty thingies are going to be AWESOME. But if they put all their focus on peripherals instead of world-building, we're just going to get another FO3 all over again.

If they repeat the cycle AGAIN and hand over the reigns to Obsidian a second time and we get ANOTHER awesome game following a considerably ambitious-yet-lackluster title, then I suppose I'd be happy. But, as I pointed out elsewhere..... that's unlikely, at BEST.
 
The problem is that most internet reviewers mistake innovation for just scrapping everything and trying something that doesn't even work at all. I rather have a reiterative sequel that improves upon the gameplay than one that just turns the game into looking choosing "paradigms" and looking at bars filling up while characters fight by themselves with no input from me. Also this idea that "modernization" is an obligation and a process that just consist in dumbing down the game and changing the genre is pretty toxic.


So Persona 5, That SUPER DUPER SPECIAL BLU RAY TRAILER only lasted 2 minutes and gave us very little new info, at least it seems like 5 will go back to the darker roots of the franchise, maybe more in line with Persona2-2, even th oI liked the tone of Persona 4 (I found the tone of 3 to be kind of monotonous and the story had a serious Pacing problem). THere is a new Character, some dude with Blue hair, could it be the villain? Support Party Member? Maybe Naoto returning? we'll have to see. At least we now know that the English release won't be delayed to 2016.
 
If only they'd figured this out 6 years ago. We might've gotten some sweet Sonic games before the name had been dragged through the dirt. =(

No comments on DA, I'm afraid. Never been into the series.
 
Well I haven't played that many Dragon Quest games, but the 8th one is just beautifull (And there is a 3DS Remake in the works) and really fun.
 
Na na na na. Those are fine games, but Sonic was amazing. Best console game of the early 90s, hands down. I was quite content with the series being a trilogy, and the 3D games being spin-offs. But when I heard about Sonic 4, my heart skipped a beat. It LOOKED just like the old games!!! At least... it LOOKED like it. Came to find out that it FELT nothing like it, sluggish, and the level design was simplistic and boring. I could write a much more detailed review, but suffice it to say, "it wasn't very good." From what I've heard, following S3&K, the best Sonic game that Sega made was Generations, and ONLY half of it (the Classic half) was any good.

It says a lot that the article specified that Sega's new owners were in the pachinko business. Apparently, so is Konami, and that's EXACTLY why both businesses gave no shits about their video games. It wasn't their primary bread earner, so they didn't really care about it, and when they DID put any attention into it, they used pachinko logic rather than video game logic. I've only ever heard of pachinko, never seen a machine in my life, but that must mean that culturally pachinko is CRAZY in Japan if several major businesses are kingpins all because of pachinko, AND to such a degree that they have no idea what they're doing when they acquire video game companies.....
 


I'm a huge fan of the old RE series. This was pretty fun to watch. I'm hoping they release both of the new RE HD remasters on physical discs in the US. I'm sick of Japan getting all the good collectors editions of RE.
 
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I kinda wish someone could re-release Kyrandia in some manner or form. Not necessarily in "HD remastered" form... cause the series was a really simple point-and-click adventure kind, it doesn't need painstaking detail put into every characters' pores. Not to mention the first game fit on 4 3.5" floppy discs, so... REALLY nothing worth putting all that effort into "upscaling the graphics". I just can't play them anymore, cause the latter 2 titles in the trilogy had data locked to the CDs, so playing them with sound was not possible. Like Diablo, downloading them from the net as abandonware doesn't work, because the on-board counter-piracy measures still work, so they're literally unplayable if you don't own the discs.

I just wanna play one of my favorite series from when I was a kid... =(
 
SnapSlav said:
I kinda wish someone could re-release Kyrandia in some manner or form. Not necessarily in "HD remastered" form... cause the series was a really simple point-and-click adventure kind, it doesn't need painstaking detail put into every characters' pores. Not to mention the first game fit on 4 3.5" floppy discs, so... REALLY nothing worth putting all that effort into "upscaling the graphics". I just can't play them anymore, cause the latter 2 titles in the trilogy had data locked to the CDs, so playing them with sound was not possible. Like Diablo, downloading them from the net as abandonware doesn't work, because the on-board counter-piracy measures still work, so they're literally unplayable if you don't own the discs.

I just wanna play one of my favorite series from when I was a kid... =(
Click to expand...

Diablo has ways around that at least. I think I ended up downloading a crack since my disc wouldn't work. Quake doesn't have that problem.
 
I found this old quote from Kojima proving he will work at Nintendo now.

"As a game designer, I'm very interested in creating something for the Wii. I'd like to run away from MGS 4 creation and create something for the Wii but unfortunately, I don't have anything that I can announce at the moment."

:grin:


Something intriguing I found about MGS4...

http://www.metagearsolid.org/reports_mgs4_soldout_1.html
 
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TorontRayne said:
Diablo has ways around that at least. I think I ended up downloading a crack since my disc wouldn't work. Quake doesn't have that problem.
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Diablo itself has no ways around that. It's designed to be uncrackable (by 90s' standards). It's just that third parties have spent many years cracking it. NONE of that worked for me, when I got the itch to replay some Diablo a couple years ago. I only succeeded when I dug my disc out of box in storage and installed it the old fashioned way. But that's all irrelevant. There's no such effort that went into cracking Diablo that was ever spent on Kyrandia... =( And Naturally Quake has no such problems: id was never an asshole about proving you bought their software. But Westwood and Blizzard (good fucking God, Blizzard and its boners for DRM before DRM was ever a thing) were notorious for those inconveniences, back in the day.

Like damn near every game I ever owned, I still have the discs and manuals lying around somewhere, so the measures implementing in TLoK1 can be bypassed. During 3 parts of the game, the game will give you a picture and tell you to type out the word on a specific paragraph/indentation on the corresponding page of the manual, and since I still have the manual, I can always do that. But TLoK2 and TLoK3, however, are much nastier with their measures. I'd instinctively wanna call them "more sophisticated", but these are over 2-decade-old games, so they're hardly that... <_< Still, like trying to get an old game working properly on a new OS, compatibility issues abound with them, so long as you don't have the discs, and said discs aren't in your drive while you run the game. The games were never big hits, so no one's ever spent the time to rewrite their code to fix these issues. You still gotta abide by their "rules" as if it's still 1992-6. =/
 


I once had a night terror that was just like that.... a massive object slowly crushing everything in it's path and the only thing I could do was delay the ineviable....
 
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Dangit why did they have to announce Horse Lords just as I finished my most recent CK2 playthrough. I'm pretty damn excited for all of the changes that're going to be in it, though. It looks like it won't be as disappointing/bare bones as Way Of Life was. I just hope the roaming hordes dispels some of the linearity that comes from the Charlemagne bookmark, because I insist on always playing from the earliest point. Although I might go back to Old Gods since it's not as painfully linear as Charlemagne is.
 
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