Video Games Megathread Number A Billion

[Kalbear]

Portal was a single-player only game and the content lasted - if you're REALLY generous - about 3 hours with very limited replay. And it was perfect at that length.

Looking at a game as 'how long will I play it for the money' is intrinsically flawed. People spend ridiculous numbers of hours on Farmville 'playing' it. WoW players get a stupid amount of hours for their money; realistically, they could play it 24/7 if they wanted to. The gameplay experience in both is nothing compared to Portal.

If that's the way you want to measure it - how long single player campaigns are - then you're likely going to be disappointed for a very, very long time.

[Poobah]

How is the multiplayer for Halo:Reach different, better, or more fun than any other already released FPS though?

If your value for money comes from the multiplayer element of the game then surely there must be some distinct difference or improvement between one iteration of a game and the next in terms of its multiplayer if you are going to buy it, unless you are buying it for the single player. If the gameplay is essentially identical than what are you paying for? Slightly better graphics? A new map pack?

And don't try and tell me that yet another halo game is going to pack into it the brilliance of Portal. Also Portal was never sold as a full priced game.

I ask how long the single player campaign will be because I know the exact quality of it already which will be average. A few boring levels, a fun level or two, a crop of OK levels. Average writing, average plot, and many modern FPS are much worse. And if I want some multiplayer I'll play CS:Source, and I won't have to pay for some shitty xbox live subscription to do it.

[Arthmail]

How is the multiplayer for Halo:Reach different, better, or more fun than any other already released FPS though?

If your value for money comes from the multiplayer element of the game then surely there must be some distinct difference or improvement between one iteration of a game and the next in terms of its multiplayer if you are going to buy it, unless you are buying it for the single player. If the gameplay is essentially identical than what are you paying for? Slightly better graphics? A new map pack?

And don't try and tell me that yet another halo game is going to pack into it the brilliance of Portal. Also Portal was never sold as a full priced game.

I ask how long the single player campaign will be because I know the exact quality of it already which will be average. A few boring levels, a fun level or two, a crop of OK levels. Average writing, average plot, and many modern FPS are much worse. And if I want some multiplayer I'll play CS:Source, and I won't have to pay for some shitty xbox live subscription to do it.

Its difference has already been touched upon. The map editor for creating your own maps has been revamped and basically redone, with features never before seen, allowing for a strong mod community. There are a number of new weapons and shield additives. I won't go through it all, but its really changed the play style over the last game. There are differences, and if you're asking what they are then you haven't looked it up, which makes your arguments moot because you're talking from the dark.

And how, exactly, do you know already that the exact quality of the campaign will be average? Have you even played the fucking game? Are you basing it off the previous games? If you didn't like the previous games, then chances are you are not going to enjoy this game. I've always enjoyed the plot lines within the Halo Universe, i mean really enjoyed them. I enjoy the hectic intensity of each of the maps, and my games seem to be a little different than your experience. I have a good deal of fun on all of the levels, some of which i like more than others, and i have a boatload of fun within certain set piece battles, which are generally pretty awe-inspiring. And again, i am not looking for the plot line of something like Fable or Dragon Age in my FPS. I want a good plot, but predicated on the idea that my main purpose in the game is still to stick my newly acquired plasma rifle in some aliens face and blow it off.

And i just want to say: average writing, average plot? Come on...at its heart its still a fucking shooter. Its going for maximum intensity of gameplay, and the story and plot are wrapped up within it. But aside from multiplayer, what has made Halo a 2 billion dollar empire, is a combination of different things. A great protagonist, great storyline, exceptional music, and a mythology that players can wrap themselves within.

You're also blathering about CS:Source and not having to pay for a shitty x-box live subscription. I don't have Live, never have, and i prefer to play PC as opposed to console. But gaming is moving into the world of consoles, and while i doubt PC games will ever die, they are in decline. My local EB Games does not even sell PC games anymore. Steam is the best source for games, at least for me.

To be honest, it sounds like you just hate Halo, and always have. I could be wrong. Perhaps your just a console hater. I will admit freely that i am a Halo lover...its really the only reason i have a console at all.

[Eurytus]

To be honest, it sounds like you just hate Halo, and always have. I could be wrong. Perhaps your just a console hater. I will admit freely that i am a Halo lover...its really the only reason i have a console at all.

From prior posts I think thats the bullseye right there.

[Inigima]

Poobah, you seriously have no idea what you're talking about and you're embarrassing yourself. You can't just say "make a few maps" like that's meaningless -- quality maps take a great deal of design work, including tactical analysis of terrain and objects, art direction, weapon placement, and so forth.

That strawman aside, there is a lot that goes into the rest of a game like Halo too, both single- and multi-player. For multiplayer, you have to worry about weapon balance, perk balance, matchmaking, server maintenance (you know how WoW goes down for maintenance every week? Halo never really goes down, and everyone uses the same matchmaking servers, unlike WoW), rewards, game types, voice chat, Xbox Live and Dashboard integration, and more. For the campaign, they have to worry about art direction, weapon balance, co-op (online and offline), writing, voice acting, sound, music -- Halo has an incredible score and always has -- and more.

In any event, looking at time for money is a flawed metric for the reasons people mentioned -- Portal is $20 and is three hours long, Halo's single-player is three times that long and three times the price, and has multiplayer that will entertain people for literally hundreds of hours. That doesn't make Portal a bad game. I don't know anyone who thought Portal wasn't worth the money.

Even if you insist on using such a ridiculous metric, Halo provides far more gameplay per dollar than Portal, one of your admitted quality games, so your objections don't appear to make a lot of sense. You question what's different between Halo iterations. I loved Halo, hated Halo 2 and 3, and I like Reach a lot, so no, they aren't the same game. Each iteration has brought, in addition to new maps -- which aren't the trivial undertaking you seem to think -- new features, game modes, engine improvements and more.

But no, you keep on being ridiculous. After all, Half-Life 2 is just Half-Life with a few new maps, amirite? And Burning Crusade and Lich King are just vanilla WoW with a few new maps. Fucking Blizzard!

[Darkostar]

That Super Mario Galaxy is just Super Mario 64 in space.

[Inigima]

That Super Mario Galaxy is just Super Mario 64 in space.

To be fair, this is pretty much true, except Super Mario Galaxy is worse. :leaving:

[Arthmail]

That Super Mario Galaxy is just Super Mario 64 in space.

Do you actually play anything Super Mario anymore? Just asking. I tried the Wi Mariocart and found it such a pale showing compared to the older versions.

[Kalbear]

Reach has a lot of gameplay improvements; weapons, maps, game modes, game mods, and most importantly matchmaking; the rating system has been heavily worked over and improved. It's really a very different experience and is closer to the MoH model than ever. Which isn't exactly new, but it's a lot of fun.

It isn't breaking the mold. It's halo. You get what you expect. But Halo was probably the first shooter on a console that had good multiplayer and was fun to play. It's sort of like Madden in that respect; it's the standard. Reach improves on it, but it's not like it's the most amazing different experience ever.

[devotee]

Will be purchasing Halo:Reach once my financial situation is better. Have been having fun with the trilogy and ODST, and I have two friends whose only reason for buying the 360 was the Halo LANs we do in Summer/Christmas vacations. Good FPS fun on balanced and fun maps.

These days, though, I mainly play JRPGs on the DS. Bought a 120-game pack in Bangkok (though 90+ of them are random crap) for cheap, so I am having a fun nostalgia trip with FF3, Chrono Trigger etc. Tried Children of Mana, though, which sucked goats. Guessing the older games in the series are better.

[Morrigan]

This might be a stupid question, but, do you have the option/setting of using 3rd person in Halo? I know it's an FPS, but so is Borderlands and you can use 3rd person. Call me weird, but I cannot play well if I don't see my character (and I'm a 100% console gamer, so while I play Borderlands on my boyfriend's PC on Steam, I use the Xbox controller because I just don't like mouse/keyboard at all, even if it's "objectively better").

I'd give Halo a try if there's the option of using 3rd person. I love Gears of War, are they similar?

[Morrigan]

Damn. Oh well.

[Arthmail]

You can, however, record the level as you are playing it and then go back and watch yourself after. At the same time you can pause it and take pictures of any events that might have been particularily cool.

[Inigima]

Will be purchasing Halo:Reach once my financial situation is better. Have been having fun with the trilogy and ODST, and I have two friends whose only reason for buying the 360 was the Halo LANs we do in Summer/Christmas vacations. Good FPS fun on balanced and fun maps.

These days, though, I mainly play JRPGs on the DS. Bought a 120-game pack in Bangkok (though 90+ of them are random crap) for cheap, so I am having a fun nostalgia trip with FF3, Chrono Trigger etc. Tried Children of Mana, though, which sucked goats. Guessing the older games in the series are better.

Yeah, Children of Mana is pretty bad. Thre are basically two good games in that series and they are Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 (the latter was never translated except unofficially so as far as I know it has no English name), both for SNES.

[Poobah]

I'm not a console hater, but in general my experience has been that console games are shorter and lower quality than PC games. I'm sorry that you all feel so defensive about the $60 or whatever that you spent on this game that you need to insult me for my opinion. If you feel you got value for money then that's great. But I just don't think it's worth it. I used to own several current gen consoles (wii and Xbox360, still have a PS2 around here somewhere) but I've ebayed them off because I could almost never find any games for them that I considered worth paying the premium that is charged for new console games these days. And yea why would I want to pay to play online via Xbox live when I can just do that for free on the PC anyway.

My personal experience with Halo has been that the first one was pretty damn good, the second one was alright and the third one was lacklustre. I haven't bought any subsequent Halo games or had any interest in subsequent Halo games as a result. I've never found the Halo universe particularly amazing or anything in the way Art espouses, however. The writing was never bad, but I wouldn't say Bungee's writing is Bioware/Valve quality either. Thus I make assumptions about Halo:Reach (which frankly I couldn't care less about either way, it was just the game which spawned this discussion) based on my previous experiences with the Halo franchise. If there is any way to make a judgement about the quality of a game is is based on personal experience with the three prequels, I mean if that isn't a valid way to decide what you think about something which is a sequel then I don't know what is. In any case I was never really specifically talking about Reach but about the ginormic amount of FPS games around, with the majority of which using multiplayer as their main selling point.

The point I was making is that if you are only interested in the FPS multiplayer element why keep buying new games? Shoot guy in face is fun, but if I can already do that with one halo game why do it with the next iteration? If you can already do that with Call of Medal of Band of....Honour and Duty 56 why buy number 57? Having class systems and whatnot in FPS has never grabbed me, but yea mileage varies, if that does it for you then go with it.

What I am TIRED of is games which are propped up with multiplayer, especially when the multiplayer is vastly similar to all previous multiplayer experiences in the FPS genre. Where someone can say "oh the singleplayer is shitty, but the multiplayer will add some hours so that's ok 8/10 because we had that one really fun match where I fragged Steve from publishing". Especially when the multiplayer on a lot of these games usually consists of pubescent morons teabagging each other and hurling slurs, racial and otherwise around.

Is it really so much to ask for to want a single player campaign that is worth a damn these days?

[Arthmail]

I'm with you on consoles, Poobah. I prefer PC to them anyday, and its a damned shame that more and more we are seeing the decline of PC games and the rise of console games. For the companies performance metrics, however, consoles makes sense. The stupid fucking things take forever to drop in price, and a popular game will be at or near full price for up to a year later, while PC games start to drop within a few short months. Wait a year and the damned things are practically free on Steam. (i love me my steam)

And i think everyone jumped on you a little bit not because they felt defensive, but because you came off as simply dismissing some of these multiplayer maps as something any chump could do without looking at the inherint difficulties involved. But whatever.

I personally found the Halo franchise to be incredibly immersive. From the music to the no named Marines that i tried and tried to keep alive on numerous missions. Even the Grunts humor was an added touch. As for the writing not being up to Bioware or Valve, Half-Life 2 was a game that i never felt was really immersive or deep - i cannot stand completely silent characters. And Bioware makes RPGs. Simply put, they are meant to have strong writing, because they can spend greater lengths of time revealing their world. In Halo, or any FPS for that matter, you have a hundredth of the amount of time, because the rest of it is spent finding new ways to kill things.

And the multiplayer is, for many, half the game. They still want the single player campaign to try and see where the story goes, but people have been playing Halo 3 in the millions of games even up to the launch of Reach. And Reach does offer more, if you haven't played Firefight on ODST then you missed it, but having four friends kill wave after wave of baddy is actually a good deal of fun. New added elements including additional shields and jet packs only add to the experience. But for me, its all about the story. I like the notion of the Spartans, the Covenant, and everything associated with it.

You know, when Valve released Left4Dead 2 everyone asked your question - why the fuck? Left4Dead 1 had not even been out a full year, they had added no new campaigns like they promised, why give us a new game. Just add to the old one. Now, for atmosphere i prefer the first game...and i also prefer Bill....who cannot die...but there is no denying that the second game has far better elements. They tweaked it, and hard. It works.

And so far as i know, you're one of the few people that thinks the single player for Halo is shitty. It seems tired to some because every game after Halo has tried to emulate it, but these are the guys that did step up FPS gaming in a significant way.

ODST was a glimpse of where it could go with Reach, and it was a nice one.

Also, lastly, i enjoyed Halo 3 immensely, with 2 being my least favorite.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

I'm sorry that you all feel so defensive about the $60 or whatever that you spent on this game that you need to insult me for my opinion.

Heh. I haven't played a Halo since the first. What I'm giving you grief about is this notion that building games is cheap and easy, which is simply untrue. You don't get long AAA fps titles anymore because it's simply too expensive to make them.

[Inigima]

No one is yelling at you because they love Halo, they're yelling at you because you're full of shit.

"Blah blah blah wrong things about the video game industry"

"Those things are wrong"

"I don't know why you have to be so defensive about video games"

You've been repeatedly rebutted and you just keep jumping from strawman to strawman.

[Poobah]

And so far as i know, you're one of the few people that thinks the single player for Halo is shitty. It seems tired to some because every game after Halo has tried to emulate it, but these are the guys that did step up FPS gaming in a significant way.

I felt that the original Halo was great for its time and it remains a great game. But yes the space marine with regenerative everything paradigm is getting pretty tired now since every fucking game ever that was released following Halo abused it mercilessly.

Halo 3 was my least favourite though. Halo 2 felt like it could have been as good as the original if it had been just a bit stronger in a few parts, but 3 didn't do much for me :(

Max: I just feel like multiplayer is much cheaper to do than Single Player because multiplayer levels are much smaller, you don't need cutscenes or voice actors, you don't need AI enemies or any storyline. You just need balanced maps and guns. And it seems like instead of building a really amazing single player game (and so many games including, say Halo 3, had great potential) they have a token single player campaign to save money.

Ini you are gonna need to look the definition of strawman up in the dictionary. I know using big debating words makes you look like you have a point but really.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

Max: I just feel like multiplayer is much cheaper to do than Single Player because multiplayer levels are much smaller, you don't need cutscenes or voice actors, you don't need AI enemies or any storyline. You just need balanced maps and guns. And it seems like instead of building a really amazing single player game (and so many games including, say Halo 3, had great potential) they have a token single player campaign to save money.

You know why GPG never released any additional maps for Demigod? Because they were too expensive to make.

And you keep missing the point. These singleplayer campaigns you regard as token? They cost. A lot.

You familiar with Torchlight? Yeah, indie, right? Should be cheap, right? Cost a couple mil.