Video Games Megathread Number A Billion

[Rhaco]

Minor complaint: Halo's control scheme really feels outdated. LT, in particular, needs to be Zoom/ADS.

Everything else seems pretty cool.

[Morrigan]

Still playing Demon's Souls. Making my 7th character build for PvP (a dex/Light Weapon hybrid) if only for a PvP tourney, but after the tournament I'll probably retool it into a pure mage. We'll see.

[Inigima]

Minor complaint: Halo's control scheme really feels outdated. LT, in particular, needs to be Zoom/ADS.

Everything else seems pretty cool.

I haven't played a lot of console shooters lately -- does any series do this besides Call of Duty?

[Poobah]

Come on now, lets at least look at it in terms of what genre it falls in. FPS are not generally 80 fucking hours long...they try to cram all of the fun into 8 or 10 hours. Comparing any FPS to Fallout or Fable is ridiculous.

In Fallout you can spend hours scrounging for the next best weapon. In Halo you can kick it off the corpse of your latest conquest and keep firing.

Halo was longer than 10 hours. I mean the original Halo.

Goldeneye for the N64, one of the best FPS games ever made on a console was at least 20 and that's doing it on a moderate difficulty.

How long is the original Half-Life?

No I'm sorry this is the shitty excuse that shitty, lazy and greedy companies come out with when they release a piece of shit generic FPS for full price when it probably took one team half an afternoon to build. No game can stand on multiplayer content alone, certainly not a full price game. And 10 hours of single player content is a hollow shell of a game, especially because what that actually means is that someone who doesn't fuck around and knows how to play will be able to polish it off in 5 hours unless they are on legendary or whatever they are calling the top difficulty these days.

-Poobs

[ultraman7k]

playing lord of the rings online for free right now. considering subscribing, having so much fun.

[Ratty]

I finally gave in and downloaded Modern Warfare 2 off Steam the other day and was horrified with how short the single player campaign was on that. I completed it in about 5 hours. Now I know multiplayer is a big part of that game, but that is a pathetic amount of time devoted to the single player campaign, also the story didn;t feel as polished as the first one, it was more gimicky. My favourite missions in the first one tended to be the the SAS missions, it was actually reversed in this one, the whole thing felt somewhat gimicky. I therefefore agree with those who mention the short single player campaigns, I still view that as a vital part of a game and I don;t feel I got my moneys worth.

[Darkostar]

Probably gonna download the new F2P LOTRO.

[Rhaco]

I haven't played a lot of console shooters lately -- does any series do this besides Call of Duty?

Most do these days, I think. Battlefield and Borderlands come immediately to mind since I've been playing those a lot recently. Even games in which LT is not true ADS it's some sort of more precise aiming, like in Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Gears of War and Transformers. Half-Life is the only other shootery game I can think of right now that doesn't use it. Maybe BioShock? I can't remember.

Not a big deal. Would be nice if Bungie allowed the user to modify the layout, though.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

No I'm sorry this is the shitty excuse that shitty, lazy and greedy companies come out with when they release a piece of shit generic FPS for full price when it probably took one team half an afternoon to build.

Go talk to a developer about how much content costs. AAA shooters don't cost tens of millions to make because everyone's swimming in hookers and blow.

[Inigima]

No game can stand on multiplayer content alone, certainly not a full price game.

Um, Team Fortress 2 would like a word with you, along with many others.

[Arthmail]

Halo was longer than 10 hours. I mean the original Halo.

Goldeneye for the N64, one of the best FPS games ever made on a console was at least 20 and that's doing it on a moderate difficulty.

How long is the original Half-Life?

No I'm sorry this is the shitty excuse that shitty, lazy and greedy companies come out with when they release a piece of shit generic FPS for full price when it probably took one team half an afternoon to build. No game can stand on multiplayer content alone, certainly not a full price game. And 10 hours of single player content is a hollow shell of a game, especially because what that actually means is that someone who doesn't fuck around and knows how to play will be able to polish it off in 5 hours unless they are on legendary or whatever they are calling the top difficulty these days.

-Poobs

The original Halo was at most ten hours, so if this was 8, then cry me a fucking river. And besides which, shooters have changed a great deal in nine years, and its moving away from story line more and more and into continous action - mostly through multiplayer. The multi-player is what has people still playing Halo 3 two years later, logging hours in the hundreds of millions, while the campaign is mostly played once, sometimes a few more. The Bungie team has focused heavily on the multiplayer aspect since Halo:CE, simply because of the nature of the community. If you look at any number of games, including one of Valves (HL2) recent titles, Left4Dead and Left4Dead2, you have pretty much the entirity of the game wrapped around the notion of multiplayer combat. For my console i don't do any multiplayer, but for my PC shooters, of which i play the most, i mostly look for online battle content.

And apparantly the map editor in Reach is something else. I'm not going to see it probably, but to each his own.

Half-Life 2 was about 12-14 hours, or so, depending on the difficulty you played on. That being said, i remember spending huge lengths of time travelling. Perhaps i remember wrong.

I don't think its lazy, and i don't think its greed that drives them to design games this way. I think its the communities desire. As for no game standing on multiplayer alone, look at Left4Dead 1 and 2. Just because things are not going the way you want, does not make everyone a piece of shit lazy company.

And besides, the frentic pace of Halo Reach, what i have played already, more than makes up for it.

[Darkostar]

Um, Team Fortress 2 would like a word with you, along with many others.

Inigma is CREDIT TO TEAM!

[burnt hound]

My 360 is alive again :D , but I don't know for how long. Just wanted to add, burnthound is my gamertag. Add me please :thumbsup:

[Cable]

And apparantly the map editor in Reach is something else. I'm not going to see it probably, but to each his own.

Half-Life 2 was about 12-14 hours, or so, depending on the difficulty you played on. That being said, i remember spending huge lengths of time travelling. Perhaps i remember wrong.

I don't think its lazy, and i don't think its greed that drives them to design games this way. I think its the communities desire. As for no game standing on multiplayer alone, look at Left4Dead 1 and 2. Just because things are not going the way you want, does not make everyone a piece of shit lazy company.

And besides, the frentic pace of Halo Reach, what i have played already, more than makes up for it.

Well said. Most of the Halos have been roughly the same length anyways, about 8-10 hours each (besides perhaps ODST). There has been great pacing in all of the titles which makes up for the lack of 20+ hour stories. Almost done the Reach campaign now and it's been very good. I forget the guy's name who does all the music for the Halos, something O'Donnell I think... he is truly unbelievable. Fantastic music can elevate any game or movie to a whole new level.

[Poobah]

Um, Team Fortress 2 would like a word with you, along with many others.

I don't remember TF2 ever being sold as a full price stand alone game. The original TF was as I recall given away with Half Life, and the second one was given away with The Orange Box. And I see that, yes, TF2 is being sold for £13.99 on steam. There's a very large difference between £13.99 and £45 or whatever for a full priced console game.

[Jon AS]

I don't remember TF2 ever being sold as a full price stand alone game. The original TF was as I recall given away with Half Life, and the second one was given away with The Orange Box. And I see that, yes, TF2 is being sold for £13.99 on steam. There's a very large difference between £13.99 and £45 or whatever for a full priced console game.

The first Team Fortress was a mod for Quake, the second incarnation (by fans of the original one) was a mod for Half Life and Team Fortress 2 (by the creators of the original) the first version that actually cost money. It probably wouldn't have become as popular as it is if its predecessors hadn't been free mods for games that were very popular in their own right.

[Inigima]

I don't remember TF2 ever being sold as a full price stand alone game. The original TF was as I recall given away with Half Life, and the second one was given away with The Orange Box. And I see that, yes, TF2 is being sold for £13.99 on steam. There's a very large difference between £13.99 and £45 or whatever for a full priced console game.

No game can stand on multiplayer content alone, certainly not a full price game.

You didn't set that as a hard conditional. But let me point to Tribes and Tribes 2, two other tremendous multiplayer games that were sold at full price, and Quake 3 Arena. All of those games were full price, multiplayer only, and superb.

[Poobah]

How much "development" does multiplayer need?

Make a few maps

Sell game at full price

???

Profit

[Arthmail]

How much "development" does multiplayer need?

Make a few maps

Sell game at full price

???

Profit

Come on, lets think about this for a minute. Now i'm no developer, but i could be wrong, but you have to think of the strategic nature of these maps. Choke points, areas of cover, sniper nests, free-flow combat areas. Add vehicles on the ground and it adds another dimension. Air vehicles, and now jet packs for Reach, and you change the very nature of the battles as they progress. You have to combine all of these things together to make a map that is fun and challanging, with areas that can be utilized to maximum benefit for the players fun and enjoyment, without creating brutal play issue discrepancies that make any one area impossible to crack, thereby giving a team or individual an advantage. It probably takes hundreds of hours to playtest one multiplayer map.

I'm reminded of a map on Battlefield Bad Company 2. Some desert map where the advancing team has to move up a highway to the first of four bases and blow up two buildings within a compound. They have to sit there and babysit the bomb as it gets ready to go off. Overlooking this little base is a cliff, which has two distinct sides to it. Snipers from both sides tend to use the rocks on this cliff as cover, especially the advancing force. But the defending force is able to jump the rocks, the other team cannot, and engage these snipers as they try and kill men within the base. Base defense always has a few more advantages than the advancing side...but for them to find this out would have taken a great deal of time and effort. And they still make mistakes. There are out of bounds areas that players are given a short amount of time to be in before they are automatically killed....preventing mass flanking manouvers. But within that same map there is an area where the advancing team can just barely pass through the no-mans land and put themselves in an advantageous positiong much closer to the defending teams base. The developers fucked up there, not too badly, but that is what they play test and work on to prevent.

If there is some way that can be found to break a map, or cause havoc in ways that the desiegners never concieved, it will be found by players. In that same game, i once won the map for us by hiding behind enemy lines with the ability to call down mortar strikes, and i hit their main helo transport every time it appeared...they simply could not get men into the battle fast enough with enough firepower to roll over us. It didn't help them that they kept trying to load the fucking thing with men first, and each mortar strike got me five or six kills.

Lastly, the map editor for Reach is said to be beyond what you would expect. That sort of shit takes time. Throwing a map together is not as easy as you seem to think.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

Make a few maps

Sell game at full price

???

Profit

You have no idea what you're talking about. It's really that simple.

There are places on the internet where you can interact with various industry insiders. If you go there and you repeat this stuff, they will laugh at you and they will call you names and it won't be because they're jealously guarding their access to hookers and blow.

Or, hell, pm DG.