singlespace

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Posts posted by singlespace

  1. Posted

    The whole thing has just been terribly planned and executed, with a rabid desire to stop pirates (and seemingly any other fucker) from playing the game at any cost. I work with cloud computers and big software launches so I understand the difficulties involved, but it's a problem that countless web-based companies deal with and overcome on a daily basis. I'm not sure why games industry companies keep getting it so wrong but they're clearly not hiring the right talent for the job.

     

    I would guess that the game industry has a lot of problems trying to attract, and retain, experienced talent.

     

    The game industry is worth something on the order of $80 billion a year. $80 billion is around how much the whole of Microsoft makes in a year. Samsung Electronics, a subsidiary of Samsung, makes more than twice that in a year. Apple flat out has more than $80 billion sitting around in cash on hand right now. Quite a few of the companies where you'd find these experts have revenues that are either in the rough ballpark of the entire games industry or more. The vast majority of game companies are not going to be able to compete with these guys for talent, infrastructure, or resources.

     

    If you're making a solid 120K plus salary at Google with benefits, perks, stock options, a 45 - 50 hour work week, with interesting work that benefits a very large portion of the world and peers who helped create some of the most interesting technology today, why would you join the game industry? You'd have less impact on society, take a significant pay cut, with worse benefits, worse perks, no options, worse hours, and would likely have generally worse working conditions on what might not even be as interesting work. That doesn't sound like a good deal.

     

    The other thing is it's one thing to have a couple experts, it's another thing to have a couple experts sitting beside the guy who co-invented C, or the world's leading expert on computer vision, or any number of exceptional people the tech sector happens to have scattered all over the place. Even if you attract some talent, it's not the same as having a very wide and deep talent pool who feed off each other.

     

    Outside of Valve and maybe Blizzard, what game company can really attract the kind of experience that would make these things solid? Even if you did attract them, poor management can squander all of that talent and the game industry isn't exactly known for having good management.

  2. Posted

    Yeah, they (Polygon) have done themselves no favors by lowering the score twice now. Their review-by-committee system is weird in and of itself, though. I'm also not a fan of arbitrary numbers being used to denote a game/film/album's quality anyways simply because of how many companies use the 7-10 Scale. EA could easily look at just the early impressions and say "Oh wow, look at all of these 9s! Nothing was wrong with the game, let's do another!". Or, and perhaps more likely, they'll use only the lower scores like these and deny bonuses to the developers like Bethesda did to the New Vegas team.

     

    It's just an absolute shame how this has turned out. The devs deserve much, much better than this. The game looks fantastic, and most non-server-related complaints could easily be patched out. But instead this debacle is the main focus.

    Why do they deserve better than this?

     

    They made the call to make the game bound to server capacity when such a thing was not necessary and are now paying the price of that choice. Everyone acknowledges that they have a great game, but having a great game that no one can play is tantamount to not having a game at all.

     

    If they insist on making the game a service instead of a primarily local experience, then they need to start acting like a service company. My biggest problem with all these companies which are trying to skirt the line between the notions of ownership and rental, services versus products, is that they try to take only the parts of the two worlds that are convenient for them while conveying none of advantages of either to the consumer. If you want to make it a licensed piece of software that you rent as a service, whether that rental is in the form of a one time fee or not, then you need to take providing that service seriously.

     

    If this happened in the telecommunications or computing sectors, there would be no "deserves... better" or it's "shame" they would be done. There would be no second chances.

  5. Posted

    Started playing Year Walk last night... didn't realize there was a companion app. What's the deal with that? I noticed I had to write a bunch of stuff down to solve puzzles (not the worst) but I assume the "companion app" is a themed tool for doing that?

     

    Definitely get the companion. 

    It's related to the game.

     

    There's a micro ARG style game for Year Walk that requires the companion to complete. Without the companion you can't finish the game.

  6. Posted

    The franchise that's best survived one-upping itself is the God of War series, if only because crazy-scale shit is essential to the aesthetic and premise. That said, the narrative has suffered from the same problems as everything else: going from a pretty focused story about personal revenge to existential threats.

    I never really got that feel from the God of War series. Maybe it wasn't intentional, but to me the narrative arc was the story of how Kratos' vengeance destroyed him. The details about Pandora's box, hope and the evils, were incidental.

     

    You can never really relate to Kratos, but in the beginning you can have some measure of sympathy for his plight. He's on a quest to avenge his betrayal and atone for the murder of his wife and daughter. As the series progresses, Kratos becomes increasingly sociopathic committing brutal atrocities, each more cruel than the last, beginning with his sacking of Rhodes and culminating in the eradication of almost all of humanity simply as colateral damage. He already had his vengeance in the original game, but his inability to let it go eventually makes him a monster.

     

    Dude needed to take up gardening or something.

  7. Posted

    Yeah, I've played off and on since the earlier releases, but quite a great deal more recently because of the Mac beta. I love all these new modern offspring of the Roguelike genre like FTL, and in many ways, Demon's Souls / Dark Souls. There's something immensely satisfying about learning the various systems and becoming skilled at games like these.

     

    At the beginning you're uncoordinated, ignorant, and clumsy, where just about anything poses a very serious threat, but a couple dozen games later you're immensely skilled and can pull off these feats that would leave the you of the past dumbfounded. Unlike RPGs and what not, the sense of progression doesn't come from the accruing of some arbitrary placeholder for accomplishment via statistics, skill trees, and items, but rather in an actual improvement in your own skill. And I know that's really the bread and butter of highly mechanically nuanced games like competitive shooters, LOMAs, and such, but the brilliance of these kinds of games is that it makes the experience of a top tier competitive player accessible.

     

    Modern Roguelike spinoffs take the entire progression and of the player from ineptitude to utterly brilliance and condenses it into this dense experience that requires a hundredth of the time and effort. Not everyone can be a top tier Quake player, but just about anyone has the aptitude to become amazing at FTL or Dark Souls.

     

    Teleglitch really captures that feel.